Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“A person who does DMT once a year is a fanatically heavy user, I would say.”
“One way of judging how toxic a drug, or a plant, is is to ask yourself the question ‘How long after I take it do I feel completely normal?’ ”
“You want a surgical strike on the synapses, is what you’re going for, not splattering all kinds of junk all over the place.”
“Growing the mushroom teaches you cleanliness, punctuality, attention to detail, steadiness, all of these virtues, which are the very virtues you need to travel smoothly in that dimension [on a magic mushroom trip].”
“Here’s a career for somebody. No hallucinogenic insect has ever been found, and yet there are persistent rumors in different parts of the world of either a butterfly or a beetle that is hallucinogenic.”
“As to why [psychoactive plants] have this peculiar effect that they do in us, I think that’s because there was, anciently, and over the evolutionary life of human beings, actually a connection between us and nature. And that these drugs are the antenna, the switches that switch us back toward the Logos of the natural world.”
“This is something people don’t realize, flowering plants are as recent as mammals. If the period of life on Earth is visualized as a yardstick, the period of the flowering plants is the last inch and a half.”
“[Psychedelics] are the [corrosive] acids of anarchy.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And I want to begin today by apologizing for the misleading title of this podcast.
00:00:32 ►
Now, it is true that you will be hearing from Terrence McKenna in this podcast today.
00:00:36 ►
For example, even though this talk was given over 25 years ago,
00:00:41 ►
he nonetheless does have a few things to say in this talk that are, well,
00:00:45 ►
they’re still kind of pertinent right now. For example, he says,
00:00:49 ►
You know, our idea of nature is that it’s all tooth and claw, survival of the fittest
00:00:55 ►
and the devil take the hindmost. The new version of evolution is entirely different. It says
00:01:02 ►
the way you attain survival is by making yourself indispensable to everybody else.
00:01:09 ►
So it’s not by triumphing over the ecosystem,
00:01:14 ►
but by integrating yourself so thoroughly into it
00:01:17 ►
that it can’t function without you.
00:01:19 ►
Then you’re on your way to being a dominant species,
00:01:23 ►
not by crushing the opposition.
00:01:26 ►
But Terrence won’t be talking about social distancing in this podcast. I’m going to talk
00:01:32 ►
about that. Of course, even that is kind of misleading because I’m going to talk about the
00:01:38 ►
opposite of social distancing, which today means forming digital communities and getting together on lines.
00:01:48 ►
And in my world, it’s in ways other than through Facebook.
00:01:53 ►
Now, the reason I want to add my comments at the beginning of a Terrence McKenna talk is that if I put my comments in a standalone podcast,
00:01:58 ►
well, not nearly as many people will download it.
00:02:01 ►
That’s just the truth.
00:02:03 ►
But I think that you’ll want this information because I’m
00:02:06 ►
now hosting four live salons every week, and you and your friends are invited to join us.
00:02:12 ►
On top of that, with some help from other salonners, we now have a 24-hour-a-day,
00:02:18 ►
seven-day-a-week chat room open just for the Psychedelic Salon. And those are the two things
00:02:24 ►
that I want to tell
00:02:25 ►
you about before I play today’s Terrence McKenna talk. First of all, if you’ve been with us here
00:02:30 ►
in the salon for a while, you already know that for the past two years, well actually over two
00:02:36 ►
years now, I’ve been hosting a live salon on Zoom every Monday night. Until now, I’ve had to restrict
00:02:42 ►
these live events to my supporters on Patreon
00:02:45 ►
because not only are they the people who are paying all the bills for expenses associated with these podcasts,
00:02:52 ►
they’re also providing a significant part of my rent.
00:02:57 ►
Two weeks ago, on our Monday Night Live Salon,
00:03:00 ►
the participants asked if it would be okay to pass along these invites to their friends.
00:03:05 ►
And that seemed like such a good idea that I found a way to open these salons up to a much wider audience.
00:03:12 ►
You see, when I first tried to do these live salons, I didn’t yet know much about Zoom
00:03:17 ►
and, well, the first one that I opened up to the public at large was a real disaster.
00:03:22 ►
There were a bunch of young kids who thought that the word psychedelic
00:03:26 ►
meant that they could scream and curse and generally behave like morons.
00:03:31 ►
And then there was a woman who started taking off her clothes.
00:03:35 ►
Well, needless to say, this event only lasted less than 10 minutes probably.
00:03:41 ►
So for over two years now, I’ve limited the salons to the 400 or so fellow salonners,
00:03:46 ►
who on average are chipping in two and a half dollars a piece each month, which in my situation
00:03:52 ►
adds up to the difference between podcasting and being a Walmart greeter. And by the way,
00:03:57 ►
there have been over a hundred other salonners who have been able to help for a month or so,
00:04:02 ►
and then their other financial obligations prevailed,
00:04:05 ►
and they had to suspend their donations for a while.
00:04:08 ►
But having been in that situation before myself,
00:04:10 ►
I certainly understand, and I also remain eternally grateful
00:04:14 ►
for the help that they could provide.
00:04:16 ►
Now, in just a moment, I’ll tell you how to find the login information for these salons,
00:04:21 ►
because I change the link each day to prevent the chaos
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that open Zoom meetings can
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sometimes be. But first, here’s the schedule for these events. Every Monday and every Thursday,
00:04:33 ►
there will be two live salons each day. The first one is held at 6 30 p.m. London time,
00:04:41 ►
that’s 6 30 at night London time, and right now, since London isn’t on Daylight Savings Time,
00:04:47 ►
the U.S. time for the first salon on Monday is 11.30 a.m. Pacific Time and 2.30 p.m. East Coast Time.
00:04:57 ►
And those two same times are for Thursdays as well.
00:05:01 ►
Now, as I’ve been doing for the past couple years,
00:05:03 ►
the day before a live salon,
00:05:05 ►
I send a personal email to all of my supporters on Patreon. But that isn’t practical for these
00:05:11 ►
expanded live salon sessions, and fortunately, and just in the nick of time, Nat, one of our
00:05:18 ►
fellow salonners, has launched a psychedelic salon server on Discord. Now, if you’re a gamer, well, then you’re probably already familiar with Discord,
00:05:28 ►
and you can sing its praises much better than me.
00:05:31 ►
The truth is, I looked into Discord months ago,
00:05:34 ►
but I didn’t really understand how useful it can be for the non-gaming world.
00:05:40 ►
And rather than tell you more about it,
00:05:42 ►
my suggestion is for you to simply join us and look around.
00:05:46 ►
While this free service allows private voice and chat video features,
00:05:51 ►
so far I’m only using the text mode, and through it I’ve already learned about books and videos that I’d not known about before.
00:05:58 ►
For example, I didn’t know that Terrence McKenna once published a limited edition book of only 75 copies, which
00:06:06 ►
he sold for $2,500 each. The book is titled Synesthesia, and it is beautifully illustrated
00:06:14 ►
by Thomas Eli in color. And thanks to fellow salonner and participant in the Salon’s Discord
00:06:20 ►
family, you can now directly download a copy in PDF format from our books channel on Discord.
00:06:27 ►
And this is also where I learned that Eric Davis’s new book is now available in audio format.
00:06:33 ►
There’s also a live stream channel where I learned about an Alex Gray live stream event that I was
00:06:39 ►
able to join. That channel, by the way, is also where you’re going to find listings of the live stream
00:06:45 ►
events that are now being planned and hosted by psychedelic societies all around the country.
00:06:51 ►
The Psychedelic Salon Discord server is also where I post the login information for each
00:06:58 ►
week’s live salons. There’s a dedicated channel on our server for live salons, and that’s where
00:07:03 ►
I’m going to be announcing the details you’re going to need to log in.
00:07:07 ►
Also, in that space, I’ll be letting you know when there will be featured guests who will be with us.
00:07:13 ►
For example, on the 6.30 p.m. Pacific Time, Monday Salon on April 6th,
00:07:18 ►
the filmmakers Niles Heckman and Rak Razam will be with us talking about their new film,
00:07:26 ►
which is the second episode in the Shamans of the Global Village series. This episode focuses on the Peote Caxis,
00:07:33 ►
and the cut that I’ve already seen, which is close to the final cut, is something I can recommend
00:07:38 ►
that you’re going to want to see if you have any interest at all in indigenous culture and or in peyote. So how do you get an invite to the
00:07:47 ►
salon’s discord server? Simple. Go to our main website at psychedelicsalon.com and near the top
00:07:55 ►
of that home page, just before the podcast listing and videos, you’ll see a link that says
00:08:00 ►
join our live conversations on discord’s psychedeledelic Salon server. It’s free.
00:08:06 ►
Simply click that link and you’ll be taken to the sign-up page.
00:08:10 ►
I hope to see you there.
00:08:11 ►
In fact, I’ve already posted the login information there for tomorrow’s two live salons.
00:08:17 ►
Well, that’s enough from me for a while.
00:08:20 ►
Now it’s time to listen to a few words of wisdom from the Bard McKenna.
00:08:24 ►
Now it’s time to listen to a few words of wisdom from the Bard McKenna.
00:08:34 ►
Initially, I intended to play the complete audio version of a Terrence McKenna talk that DreamCloud Middlemen posted to our Discord server.
00:08:42 ►
Well, the talk is from a day-long workshop at Claremont College in Southern California addressing the Young Society of Greater Los Angeles.
00:08:45 ►
And it took place sometime in 1991.
00:08:51 ►
But as I was getting ready to post it for today, some of my friends told me that they are worried about their data limits getting high and asked for the next few podcasts to
00:08:55 ►
have smaller sizes.
00:08:57 ►
So after I watched it online for myself, I realized that after an hour I was kind of
00:09:03 ►
burned out watching the video and turned it off
00:09:05 ►
just before the question and answer session. But later, after I listened to the Q&A session,
00:09:11 ►
I decided to just podcast that here today. And happily, at this workshop, all of the questions
00:09:17 ►
were written on little cards and not asked by long-winded intros before they get to the question.
00:09:23 ►
And this seemed to work really well.
00:09:25 ►
So now here is Terrence McKenna reading and answering questions
00:09:29 ►
that were on some of our minds back in 1991.
00:09:34 ►
Since DMT is present in the brain,
00:09:38 ►
does the introduction of excess DMT shut down the production of natural DMT
00:09:44 ►
in the way that the body stops producing opiates during opium
00:09:48 ►
usage? If so, what are the effects? Is DMT
00:09:52 ►
really so perfectly chemically benign? The first
00:09:56 ►
point to make is that many of your questions
00:10:00 ►
cannot be answered because research into these areas is
00:10:04 ►
not allowed.
00:10:06 ►
So often we can’t answer your question.
00:10:11 ►
This question,
00:10:12 ►
does the introduction of excess DMT
00:10:15 ►
limit endogenous production?
00:10:18 ►
I can say with fair confidence
00:10:20 ►
that that’s never been studied.
00:10:22 ►
My guess would be that it does not
00:10:25 ►
because the DMT is in no sense of the word
00:10:29 ►
do you become habituated to DMT.
00:10:32 ►
I mean, a person who does DMT once a year
00:10:35 ►
is a fanatically heavy user, I would say.
00:10:40 ►
And the question,
00:10:43 ►
is DMT really so chemically benign?
00:10:47 ►
Again, this has not been studied the way you would study with rats and so forth to determine it.
00:10:52 ►
But experientially speaking, the amazing thing about DMT is the speed with which you return to normal.
00:11:00 ►
You return to the baseline of consciousness in under 10 minutes.
00:11:04 ►
You return to the baseline of consciousness in under 10 minutes.
00:11:11 ►
Well, that tells you that the brain is very well able to deal with this compound.
00:11:17 ►
One way of judging how toxic a drug or a plant is,
00:11:19 ►
is to ask yourself the question,
00:11:24 ►
how long after I take it do I feel completely normal? And with DMT you feel completely normal 15 minutes
00:11:29 ►
after taking it. It’s the shortest recovery time of any drug. This question is concerning the bundle
00:11:38 ►
weed. While it does not directly meet the criteria of long-term use, is it to be considered safe? I’d say the way to answer
00:11:48 ►
that question is to do a chemical analysis of the bundle weed. If there’s nothing present but DMT in
00:11:55 ►
it, I would think it should be considered safe. Now, there may be other compounds present. In South America, it’s possible to contrast two plants, Psychotria viridis,
00:12:09 ►
which has almost entirely nothing in it except DMT as the portion of its alkaloid fraction,
00:12:16 ►
or Varrola carthaginensis, which is used in the making of snuff. And chemically, it’s a mess.
00:12:26 ►
It looks like they swept the floor.
00:12:29 ►
You’ve got NNDMT, 5-MeO-DMT,
00:12:32 ►
alpha-methyltryptamine, monomethyltryptamine,
00:12:35 ►
6-hydroxy-O-methyltryptamine.
00:12:37 ►
All of this, this you don’t want.
00:12:39 ►
You want a narrow, a surgical strike on the synapse is what you’re going for,
00:12:46 ►
not splattering all kinds of junk all over the place.
00:12:52 ►
What is the best medium for psilocybin spore germination?
00:12:57 ►
Potato agar or what?
00:12:59 ►
The best medium is rye malt agar.
00:13:03 ►
No question about it.
00:13:04 ►
Go with rye. Organic rye malt agar. No question about it. Go with rye.
00:13:07 ►
Organic rye malt extract.
00:13:10 ►
In today’s climate,
00:13:12 ►
talk about access to shamanic pharmaceuticals
00:13:15 ►
for the average person.
00:13:18 ►
This is the where do I get it question.
00:13:22 ►
Dressed up in respectable terms.
00:13:26 ►
Well, without being too self-serving,
00:13:30 ►
let me say my brother and I wrote a book
00:13:32 ►
on cultivating mushrooms
00:13:34 ►
called Psilocybin, the Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide
00:13:38 ►
by Otios and O.N. Neerik.
00:13:41 ►
I’m Otios, as you can see.
00:13:44 ►
And I really believe in growing mushrooms.
00:13:49 ►
If you are, as you sit here,
00:13:52 ►
not psychically strong enough or balanced enough
00:13:56 ►
to take psilocybin,
00:13:58 ►
then if you learn to grow it at the end of that process,
00:14:01 ►
you will be.
00:14:02 ►
Because growing the mushroom teaches you cleanliness, punctuality,
00:14:09 ►
attention to detail, steadiness, all of these virtues,
00:14:16 ►
which are the very virtues you need to travel smoothly in that dimension.
00:14:22 ►
Other hallucinogens, other shamanic hallucinogens
00:14:26 ►
that you will find easily available to you
00:14:28 ►
without breaking any laws,
00:14:31 ►
the heavenly blue morning glories
00:14:34 ►
sold in every seed store and garden store
00:14:37 ►
are not to be taken.
00:14:39 ►
Do not take them.
00:14:41 ►
They have been dipped in a fungicide
00:14:43 ►
that will make you sick.
00:14:47 ►
Grow them and collect your crop and take them. They have been dipped in a fungicide that will make you sick. Grow them and collect your crop and take that. And this is a major hallucinogen of great antiquity, extremely
00:14:56 ►
visionary. The Hawaiian wood rose, you can obtain this from people who make dried flower arrangements
00:15:07 ►
often have these. Pay attention, you want the Hawaiian
00:15:12 ►
baby wood rose. If they try to give you something called
00:15:16 ►
Hawaiian wood rose, a big clunky thing, that
00:15:19 ►
is inactive and won’t do it.
00:15:25 ►
The detouras are freely available.
00:15:28 ►
I do not recommend them.
00:15:29 ►
I recommend against them,
00:15:30 ►
but they’re a common landscaping plant
00:15:33 ►
in Southern California,
00:15:35 ►
and the Jimson weed, of course,
00:15:37 ►
is growing out in the desert
00:15:38 ►
out around Lancaster
00:15:40 ►
and other places like that.
00:15:43 ►
There are a couple of companies which have very
00:15:47 ►
forthrightly decided to sell plants with a history of shamanic involvement. I own no stock
00:15:57 ►
in these companies, so I can recommend them without fear or favoritism. One is called Of the Jungle up in Sebastopol, California,
00:16:08 ►
and the other one is called Dream Gardens,
00:16:11 ►
and I think it’s here in Santa Monica.
00:16:14 ►
Both of these groups publish astonishingly complete catalogs
00:16:19 ►
of psychoactive and shamanically important plants.
00:16:24 ►
of psychoactive and shamanically important plants.
00:16:28 ►
Okay, that’s access without going to the streets or committing crimes or anything like that.
00:16:32 ►
Can you tell us any more about Illinois bundleweed?
00:16:35 ►
I just did.
00:16:37 ►
And that’s really all I can tell you about it.
00:16:41 ►
All these questions are the same question.
00:16:44 ►
Having convinced us of the wonder of DMT,
00:16:47 ►
what would be the easiest and quickest way to obtain it?
00:16:53 ►
How does one acquire DMT?
00:17:00 ►
Comment about the Supreme Court ruling against the use of peyote by North American Indians.
00:17:07 ►
Very bad law, obviously.
00:17:10 ►
Law so bad that the National Council of Churches, the National Jewish Affairs Committee,
00:17:16 ►
and some very large Catholic organization all filed briefs protesting this thing.
00:17:29 ►
And I think that it was actually realized that it was a goof.
00:17:32 ►
And it will be brought back in the next… You can’t bring something back to the Supreme Court in a hurry
00:17:35 ►
because then that’s unseemly.
00:17:37 ►
But I would bet that within five to ten years this will be overturned
00:17:41 ►
because a close reading of this law means that wine for Pesach or communion
00:17:50 ►
could be construed as a psychoactive substance
00:17:53 ►
and the whole thing was just bad law, bad idea.
00:18:00 ►
Has consideration been given to the possibility
00:18:03 ►
that in the case of certain plants, which are recounted in writings, but the identity is unknown, that the reason they are unknown is because shamans purposefully kept their identity a secret. This goes to this question I raised this morning. How can a powerful hallucinogen once discovered ever be lost?
00:18:28 ►
And I’ve only been able to figure out one scenario in which this could happen.
00:18:34 ►
It happens like this.
00:18:37 ►
People discover a wonderful plant that imparts visions or insight or something.
00:18:44 ►
And everybody takes it and enjoys it and then
00:18:48 ►
slowly a hierarchy emerges a professional class priests and only they they decree that only they
00:18:58 ►
will be allowed to take it and then they lord it over the rest of society with an iron hand
00:19:05 ►
and then the rest of the society gets fed up with that
00:19:09 ►
and there’s a slave revolt
00:19:11 ►
and everybody in the ruling class is killed
00:19:14 ►
and the sacrament is lost
00:19:16 ►
I can’t figure out any other way that it could happen
00:19:20 ►
and the Vedic thing, this seems quite reasonable
00:19:23 ►
obviously Soma was
00:19:25 ►
being more and more confined in its use to a single class and then that class
00:19:31 ►
became viewed as obnoxious and its overthrow and the death of this sacrament
00:19:37 ►
then follow each other perhaps such secrets are still being kept. Perhaps they are.
00:19:51 ►
The fact that this bundle weed could turn up at so late a date probably means that there are shamanic lineages with secrets that we don’t know.
00:19:56 ►
As a field ethnobotanist and an explorer,
00:20:01 ►
I’m always interested in the unconfirmable rumor,
00:20:04 ►
and there are some
00:20:05 ►
doozies.
00:20:07 ►
The mysterious beetle from eastern Brazil
00:20:12 ►
which causes intense hallucinogens if
00:20:15 ►
eaten. Here’s a career for somebody.
00:20:18 ►
No hallucinogenic insect has
00:20:21 ►
ever been found, and yet there are persistent
00:20:24 ►
rumors in different parts
00:20:26 ►
of the world of either a butterfly
00:20:28 ►
or a beetle
00:20:29 ►
that is hallucinogenic.
00:20:33 ►
Most shamans
00:20:34 ►
in the Amazon, if you spend
00:20:36 ►
five or six weeks with them
00:20:38 ►
and take ayahuasca with them
00:20:40 ►
and tromp around with them, when you finally
00:20:42 ►
get to know them, they will allow
00:20:44 ►
as how there is another magic,
00:20:48 ►
which they call the magic of the big trees.
00:20:51 ►
And I’ve spent half my life trying to find out the names of the big trees,
00:20:58 ►
and I’m still working on it.
00:21:00 ►
We have collectors in Peru, and nothing is more exciting than a clump of rootstock or a seed packet that comes across our desk labeled suspect hallucinogen. That gets me to the edge of my chair.
00:21:24 ►
What do you think of Robert Monroe, the journey out of the body man?
00:21:31 ►
Well, this is a good time to discuss what do I think of all these other things on the spiritual market.
00:21:34 ►
I don’t know what to think about them.
00:21:35 ►
I’m not a spiritual consumer.
00:21:40 ►
I’ve never been to a workshop that wasn’t my own unless it was free.
00:21:50 ►
And there’s a lot of stuff out there, you know, astral traveling, channeling, all of this stuff. And I tend to either believe it’s bogus or it’s for people with a psychic constitution
00:21:58 ►
considerably different from my own. Sometimes people say to me, well, these states that you’re talking about, can’t
00:22:06 ►
they be achieved without drugs? Well, the answer to that is, my God, who would want to? What would
00:22:15 ►
be proved by achieving these things without drugs? If the things I’m talking about began to happen to me without drugs, I would be very, very concerned and alarmed
00:22:27 ►
because, you know, I just don’t. And also, I think there’s something to be said for admitting
00:22:40 ►
that we cannot do it alone, that if you want this spiritual insight if you want
00:22:47 ►
The guy and matrix to welcome you then humble yourself to the point of making a deal with a plant
00:22:56 ►
That’s the key. You can’t enter the bank without the key to the bank
00:23:00 ►
The key to the bank is a plant jumping up and down outside the bank and exhorting
00:23:07 ►
the banker to recognize your inner worth and open the door is just not going to do it.
00:23:15 ►
I can understand that psychoactive alkaloids are a survival mechanism for the plants.
00:23:21 ►
Why is that effect psychoactive in man or perhaps animal?
00:23:30 ►
Well, first of all, maybe we have to argue with your premise. You’re right that a lot of these
00:23:36 ►
so-called secondary and tertiary compounds are elaborated supposedly to make things taste bad so that birds will spit out things and stuff like that.
00:23:49 ►
But on the other hand, they’ve studied this question fairly closely,
00:23:53 ►
and a lot of these alkaloids are produced specifically to attract animals,
00:23:59 ►
to bring them in to nectaries and as pollinators and that sort of thing.
00:24:04 ►
to nectaries and as pollinators and that sort of thing.
00:24:09 ►
Old-style botany always believes these compounds are what’s called tertiary to metabolism,
00:24:12 ►
meaning they’re kind of like waste products
00:24:15 ►
and not very important, garbage.
00:24:17 ►
But when you look carefully at a psychoactive plant,
00:24:22 ►
invariably what you see is that the psychoactive chemistry is going on where
00:24:27 ►
metabolism is most active. This is an indication that actually these things aren’t tertiary at all.
00:24:34 ►
They are doing something for the plant, but we don’t know what it is.
00:24:38 ►
As to why they have this peculiar effect that they do in us,
00:24:44 ►
they have this peculiar effect that they do in us.
00:24:51 ►
I think that’s because there was anciently and over the evolutionary life of human beings
00:24:54 ►
actually a connection between us and nature
00:24:58 ►
and that these drugs are the antenna,
00:25:03 ►
the switches,
00:25:11 ►
that switch us back toward the logos of the natural world. I suspect that all of nature is a seamless web
00:25:16 ►
of pheromonally mediated connections and interactions,
00:25:21 ►
and that we are just not yet at a sufficient level of analysis and sophisticated
00:25:27 ►
observation to see this interconnected web. You know, our idea of nature is that it’s all tooth
00:25:34 ►
and claw, survival of the fittest and the devil take the hindmost. The new version of evolution
00:25:42 ►
is entirely different. It says the way you attain survival is by
00:25:47 ►
making yourself indispensable to everybody else. So it’s not by triumphing over the ecosystem,
00:25:56 ►
but by integrating yourself so thoroughly into it that it can’t function without you.
00:26:01 ►
Then you’re on your way to being a dominant species, not by crushing
00:26:06 ►
the opposition. Let’s see how we’re doing here. What are deconstructionists doing to
00:26:13 ►
our understanding of the language? Is it helpful? By deconstructionists I suppose
00:26:25 ►
you mean Jacques Derrida
00:26:28 ►
and that crowd
00:26:31 ►
well I think deconstruction serves a very useful function
00:26:36 ►
I think we are unaware
00:26:37 ►
of what
00:26:40 ►
how thoroughly language is the medium
00:26:44 ►
in which we swim how thoroughly our world the medium in which we swim,
00:26:46 ►
how thoroughly our world is built of language.
00:26:49 ►
In a way, the boundary-dissolving character
00:26:52 ►
of the plant hallucinogens
00:26:54 ►
is a dissolving of language barriers.
00:26:57 ►
They show you that the surface of reality
00:27:00 ►
was not the surface of reality,
00:27:02 ►
it was the surface of your local language.
00:27:06 ►
And now it’s gone.
00:27:16 ►
And here is what lies beneath it. At what point in the evolution of organic matter on earth do psychoactive plants appear and why? Interesting question. If we’re talking about psychoactive fungi, we’re severely limited by
00:27:27 ►
the fossil record because no fossil mushroom has ever been found older than 40 million years.
00:27:32 ►
This is because fossil mushrooms are very soft-bodied, ephemeral kind of things. As primary
00:27:40 ►
decomposers, which is what fungi are doing on this earth, it’s reasonable to assume that they must have been here
00:27:47 ►
from the very beginning of the conquest of the land,
00:27:51 ►
but proof in the fossil record has not been forthcoming.
00:27:55 ►
Now, if we’re talking about higher plants, flowering plants,
00:28:00 ►
which is mostly what we’re talking about here,
00:28:02 ►
then no flowering plants existed before 65 million years ago.
00:28:08 ►
Flowering plants emerged out of the same catastrophe
00:28:11 ►
that destroyed the dinosaurs
00:28:13 ►
and set the stage for the emergence of the mammals.
00:28:17 ►
This is something people don’t realize.
00:28:19 ►
Flowering plants are as recent as mammals.
00:28:25 ►
You know, if you look If the period of life on earth is visualized as a yardstick,
00:28:32 ►
the period of the flowering plants is the last inch and a half.
00:28:37 ►
And it’s also the rise of the mammals occurs in that last inch and a half.
00:28:42 ►
So before that, the plant life on the earth was of a
00:28:45 ►
very different sort, and we know nothing about its chemistry. Here’s someone who asked a Zen question.
00:28:57 ►
What would make the present government interested in the study of psychedelics?
00:29:02 ►
in the study of psychedelics.
00:29:07 ►
I don’t know.
00:29:10 ►
If they could make a buck out of it.
00:29:14 ►
I don’t think they’re very interested in psychedelics.
00:29:16 ►
I don’t think any political…
00:29:18 ►
What?
00:29:20 ►
The MKUltra program, the CIA,
00:29:22 ►
they were very interested in psychedelics.
00:29:24 ►
Except that they abandoned it.
00:29:26 ►
Yes, MKUltra, for those of you who don’t know,
00:29:30 ►
stands for Mind Control, spelled the southern way.
00:29:36 ►
Mind Control Ultra was a program the CIA pursued in the 1960s where they tried out all kinds of psychedelic drugs,
00:29:40 ►
and they also worked with it in combination with hypnosis.
00:29:45 ►
They were trying to make what they called the Trojan horse.
00:29:48 ►
This was somebody who would be an assassin but not even know it.
00:29:53 ►
And how far they got with all of this we will never know
00:29:57 ►
because, of course, it all disappears behind the walls of secrecy.
00:30:01 ►
But the declassified history of the CIA and LSD is very interesting.
00:30:08 ►
Some of you may know the book Acid Dreams by Martin Lee. Fascinating history of the way the
00:30:17 ►
government tried and really failed, I think, to use psychedelics that the government’s of initial approach to LSD was
00:30:28 ►
This is great, this is a truth serum we can give this to enemy agents and they’ll tell us all we know
00:30:36 ►
Well a few months of following that path they decided no
00:30:42 ►
This is an obscurity drug.
00:30:45 ►
We can give this to our agents
00:30:47 ►
and they can take it if they’re captured
00:30:49 ►
and no one can learn anything from it.
00:30:52 ►
And, you know, clearly this was not a fruitful path either.
00:30:58 ►
And I really, I don’t fault the government.
00:31:01 ►
I don’t really fault the government for this.
00:31:03 ►
After all, the government is in the business of being the government. I don’t think any institution can inculcate
00:31:11 ►
psychedelics into its own program because psychedelics destroy institutions, all institutions.
00:31:19 ►
I mean, it’s like trying to move an acid around that corrodes whatever pipes you pour it through.
00:31:27 ►
And because the boundary-dissolving quality of psychedelics
00:31:34 ►
is precisely the quality that government is involved in resisting.
00:31:40 ►
Government builds up labels, hands out role models, explains how everything is, and this stuff just then melts that back into a primal chaos.
00:31:54 ►
So it’s pretty corrosive of any social values that don’t arise spontaneously out of biological organization.
00:32:03 ►
It’s anarchist.
00:32:08 ►
It’s the acid of anarchy in a way.
00:32:11 ►
All right, we’re never going to get through this list,
00:32:14 ►
but it’s gratifying to know it’s here if we need it.
00:32:20 ►
Here’s a question about the time wave,
00:32:21 ►
which I’m going to skip because we’re not talking about the time wave today,
00:32:25 ►
and pity the poor soul who’s never heard of it.
00:32:30 ►
Know of any herbal sources to raise serotonin as a treatment for depression?
00:32:37 ►
No, I’m not, I don’t know a lot about herbal medicine and that sort of thing, but raising serotonin
00:32:46 ►
level as a treatment for depression
00:32:48 ►
seems like a pretty good strategy.
00:32:51 ►
I don’t know
00:32:52 ►
of herbs. Usually
00:32:53 ►
inhibition of serotonin
00:32:56 ►
is what’s going on. And with
00:32:58 ►
these psychedelics, they do compete
00:33:00 ►
with serotonin for the bond
00:33:02 ►
site. That’s what
00:33:03 ►
it’s all about at the atomic level,
00:33:07 ►
is in your synaptic cleft, in the synaptic clefts of your neurons, there are what are called
00:33:15 ►
receptors. And if you were to fly down and look at these things, they look like complex
00:33:23 ►
They look like complex locks.
00:33:29 ►
They’re hooks, protuberances, little drawers and fit-in places.
00:33:36 ►
Well, then the drug molecule is carried into the synaptic cleft by the bloodstream and it seeks to what’s called occupy the bond site or simply bond.
00:33:44 ►
And it’s trying to fit in. Well, the normal thing which fits in those
00:33:49 ►
bonding sites is serotonin. But some of these hallucinogens are much better fits than natural
00:33:57 ►
serotonin. They are what pharmacologists say competitive at the bond site. And so they literally elbow the serotonin out of the way.
00:34:08 ►
And then they fit themselves into the receptor.
00:34:12 ►
Well, once the receptor and its fit, its agonist, are in place,
00:34:20 ►
then the biodynamic, the bioelectric field of the synapse can be activated.
00:34:28 ►
Well, if you swap out serotonin for an exotic molecule
00:34:32 ►
like harmin or mescaline or something like that,
00:34:36 ►
well, then this shifts the mode of this molecular level electrical environment.
00:34:45 ►
And I believe that that is what then registers
00:34:48 ►
as a higher cortical experience that we call the trip.
00:34:52 ►
It’s the experience of hundreds of millions
00:34:55 ►
of these introduced molecules
00:34:58 ►
displacing the normal serotonin
00:35:01 ►
and then broadcasting this signal
00:35:05 ►
in a slightly different way
00:35:07 ►
than it is normally perceived.
00:35:11 ►
So there’s a molecular connection.
00:35:13 ►
There’s a connection down
00:35:15 ►
into the molecular level.
00:35:18 ►
This will be our last one this morning.
00:35:22 ►
Language transcendence.
00:35:24 ►
Huxley, Jung, and others
00:35:25 ►
often mention liberating and enlightening
00:35:28 ►
liberating and enlightening epiphanies
00:35:30 ►
as beyond language and iconic imagery.
00:35:34 ►
You yourself mentioned this.
00:35:36 ►
Can you explain further
00:35:38 ►
the use of transcendental language?
00:35:42 ►
Yeah, and we might talk about that
00:35:44 ►
a little this afternoon. I sort of alluded to it
00:35:48 ►
this morning. My idea is that language is a process that is half completed in us as we sit here,
00:35:56 ►
and that language is really something which wants to be seen, not heard, but that we are on our way to evolving toward this visible language.
00:36:10 ►
And we currently are operating with these somewhat substandard acoustical codes.
00:36:15 ►
And I think in a way history is the process of getting out, revealing, defining, refining
00:36:24 ►
this natural language.
00:36:25 ►
The place where the psychedelics impact upon us as social creatures
00:36:31 ►
is the language domain.
00:36:34 ►
I mean, you may have tremendous hierophanies and breakthroughs,
00:36:39 ►
but if you can’t talk about it or paint about it or dance about it
00:36:44 ►
or in any way communicate it to anybody,
00:36:47 ►
then it is not efficacious for the species.
00:36:50 ►
It’s just your private entertainment.
00:36:54 ►
So the domain of language is where the collective impact is coming.
00:36:59 ►
And one of the things I think about psychedelics
00:37:01 ►
is that they are probably capable of helping us force
00:37:06 ►
the evolution
00:37:07 ►
of language because we cannot
00:37:10 ►
move into the future
00:37:12 ►
any faster than
00:37:14 ►
our language
00:37:16 ►
of description for the future
00:37:18 ►
so if we’re interested
00:37:19 ►
in streamlining culture
00:37:21 ►
and getting away from
00:37:24 ►
this sort of
00:37:25 ►
random walk style of cultural evolution,
00:37:28 ►
then we have to look at rationally
00:37:32 ►
interfacing with the evolution of language.
00:37:38 ►
And maybe we can talk about that
00:37:40 ►
when we come back.
00:37:42 ►
Thanks very much.
00:37:45 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:37:48 ►
where people are changing their lives
00:37:49 ►
one thought at a time.
00:37:53 ►
Do you think that back in 1991,
00:37:56 ►
Terence McKenna was already having a premonition
00:37:59 ►
that the day would soon arrive
00:38:00 ►
when the whole world would be on pause,
00:38:03 ►
causing us all to begin thinking about ways
00:38:06 ►
in which to maybe streamline our new culture.
00:38:10 ►
Well, since this talk was given over 25 years ago, there’s been some changes in some of
00:38:14 ►
the positions Terrence had.
00:38:16 ►
For example, I’ve seen some reports of microscopic fossilized fungus, and there are also several
00:38:23 ►
revealing and really well-documented books about
00:38:25 ►
MK-ULTRA, among some of the other references that Terrence made in this talk that can be brought up
00:38:31 ►
to date today. However, since you may have a little more time on your hands right now, I’m going to
00:38:38 ►
let you research that on your own. Who knows what interesting side trails those surges may take you on. And let me say also
00:38:46 ►
that I am well aware that some of our fellow salonners don’t have any extra time right now.
00:38:53 ►
They are the health care workers, law enforcement and military, delivery and warehouse people, and
00:38:59 ►
everyone else who are the essential workers who are going to be keeping us safe in the
00:39:04 ►
weeks and months ahead.
00:39:05 ►
I love you all and deeply appreciate the sacrifices that you’re making for all of us.
00:39:11 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo, but I’m not going to be signing off from cyberdelic space.
00:39:17 ►
Instead, I’m going to simply refocus my cyberdelic attention to the psychedelic salon server on discord.com.
00:39:25 ►
Namaste,
00:39:26 ►
my friends. Thank you.