Program Notes
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Guest speakers: Terence McKenna and Elizabeth Gips
This podcast is dedicated to long-time saloner MARJEAN McKENNA
This is a recording, from 1985, of an interview that Elizabeth Gips conducted with Terence McKenna at his home.
The interview begins, like most of the 1980s era McKenna interviews, with a detailed question about DMT, but Elizabeth quickly gets them on a more interesting track. And the reason that I say “more interesting” is because here in the salon we’ve already covered most of the nuts and bolts of various psychedelic experiences. It’s the reasons that draw us to these substances that I find to be the most interesting.
When choosing a new psychedelic experience, Terence suggests asking three questions about the substance you are considering: 1) does it have a shamanic history; 2) does it occure in the tissue of a plant or animal; and 3) does it bear a simularity with compounds in our brains.
In Memoriam: Elizabeth Gips, 1922–2001
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Transcript
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Three-dimensional, transforming, musical, linguistic objects.
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Alpha Chains.
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And as many of you have told me, it’s, well, it’s about time for the salon to get going again after this long pandemic slowdown.
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And I’ve come across a good way to get started. But first I have a few announcements. And to
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begin with, while there have been very few podcasts posted here lately, the salon has been quite active.
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During the first year of the pandemic,
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I hosted four live salons a week
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to keep us busy during the lockdowns,
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and since then I’ve been hosting two live salons every week,
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one on Monday in the evening
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and one on Thursdays around noon.
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I send email links to the live events
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to my supporters on Patreon, to whom I owe a great deal.
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I really don’t know how I would have been able to make ends meet these past two years without them.
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Unfortunately, some of my supporters lost their jobs during this pandemic and had to drop off Patreon.
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In fact, at the beginning of the pandemic, we had over 500 supporters on Patreon.
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But unfortunately, only 300 of them we had over 500 supporters on Patreon.
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But unfortunately, only 300 of them have been able to hang on lately.
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So I’ve been posting the links to the live salons on our Discord server as well.
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That keeps those people that had to drop out from Patreon to keep them from being left out.
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As you know, you can join our Discord community without even leaving your email address.
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And the invite link for that is at the top of the page at psychedelicsalon.com.
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Now, if you’re interested in these live salons, where some of our regulars have shared some great stories about tripping on acid with Dr. Hoffman, among many other wild adventures and psychedelic tips, well, you can become a $1 a month Patreon supporter
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and listen to the more than 150 recordings of these live conversations that I’ve posted
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on Patreon.
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And I think that you’re going to find some of them, if not most of them, really fascinating
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and quite informative.
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Now let’s get on with today’s program.
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And I’m sorry to say to those who complain about my long
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introductions, but I’ve got a little background story to tell about the recording I’m about to
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play. So if my introductions bother you, well, maybe you should upgrade your mp3 player and
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get one of those fast forward buttons. But here’s some information for those of you who are still
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with us. On several occasions, I’ve mentioned that I’ve been trying to obtain copies of recordings
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made of Elizabeth Gipson’s radio programs.
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And in today’s notes, I’ll link to some information about her.
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But just to give you a small idea of how important she was to our community
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back in those early days before the World Wide Web,
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well, when she died, the Maps
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Bulletin did a feature story about her. Not only was she a friend of Jim Morrison, Elizabeth Gipps
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is the only person to have recorded an interview of the legendary D.M. Turner. Now, back during the
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summer of 2012, I was at an event somewhere, and I met a man who told me that he had some recordings of
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her programs and that he would send me some. Well, those were really busy days for me with
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appearances at Esalen and other places here on the coast. And then life got in the way,
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our rent was raised, and we had to move again. It’s been now over a decade since that conversation,
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and I’m just now unpacking from yet another move.
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And as I was unpacking the other day, well, I came across a small pile of snail mail that I’d never opened.
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It was from the summer of 2012.
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And in that mail were the DVDs this wonderful man had promised.
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They were both recordings of the interviews that Elizabeth Gipps had done,
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and one was with Timothy Leary, and the other, the one I’m going to play for you today,
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is with Terrence McKenna. Now the reason I think you’re going to get something out of
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yet another Terrence McKenna recording is that this one took place in Terrence’s living room in
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- Now that’s six years before the web hit the streets, and from an
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historical perspective, there are several gems here that take us back to some of Terrence’s old
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themes that seem to have slipped to the wayside when he became more famous. However, there is one
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very short and yet important comment that Terrence makes. When Elizabeth mentions that the Mayan calendar comes
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to an end on December 21st, 2012, keep in mind now this is in 1985, well when she brings that up,
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Terence speaks up and says that his own calculation using the I Ching for the time wave
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came up with a date just 30 days earlier. Now I realize that the time wave is old and mainly discarded news,
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but there’s always been this controversy about how Terrence actually came to the December 21st date.
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Until now, as far as I can remember,
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the only other reference actually by Terrence to this change
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is in a letter that Bruce Dahmer has.
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Now we have Terrence in his own words,
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admitting that his calculations didn’t come out exactly on December 21st.
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And now that I’ve said all of this,
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I realize that it’s really not a very big deal to anybody but Bruce and me.
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So I’m sorry to have delayed the start of this talk for that unimportant story.
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So let’s get on with it.
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And as you will hear, like all of Terrence’s early Q&As,
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it begins with a very specific question about drugs.
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Fortunately, Elizabeth quickly gets the conversation shifted to a more fascinating track.
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And when I return, I’m going to dedicate this podcast to a very special salonner who sadly is no longer with us.
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But first, here is a 1985 McKenna interview with Elizabeth Gipps and her co-host, who begins with one of the strangest DMT questions that I’ve ever heard.
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Anna’s house, we being Lou DeBurbin and Elizabeth, me,
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and we’re sitting in this incredible collection of books in a very beautiful home in a wonderful, magical spot near…
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Is it Marin County?
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No, it’s Sonoma County.
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This is Sonoma County.
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Western Sonoma County, far from Sonoma.
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Talking.
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So I will tape the conversation,
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and if Terrence has special information that he’d like you all,
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you aware people of the United States to have, he’ll let us have it.
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And we will mention the fact that he has a new
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book which is on cassette and he’ll talk some about that too and where it can be ordered.
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That’s all. That feel like a good introduction to everybody?
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Yeah, that sounds fine.
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Okay, here we go.
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Okay.
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Maybe I’ll just start off by asking a couple of questions that have been on my mind.
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Maybe I’ll just start off by asking a couple of questions that have been on my mind. A fascination with the combination of DMT and Harmeen and things of this nature.
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And what I’m interested in is those places or plants or animals or ways in which people can come close to or have historically come close to
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or have had access to DMT.
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And I remember you briefly mentioned a process
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whereby by combining rabbit lungs, say, and pig intestines,
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you could actually in some way create or obtain DMT.
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And I was wondering if you could go into a little more detail
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on how that could be done.
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I’m not sure pig intestines is the second ingredient,
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but what you need is a source of tryptophan, which is a common amino acid,
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and then rabbit lung, which is replete with an omethylation enzyme,
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omethyltransferase,
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and it will omethylate the tryptamine into a psychoactive,
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which is just an example of what’s called cauldron chemistry,
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where you use animal enzymes to do chemical transformations.
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Another one that has been discussed in the literature is using the decarboxylation activity of enzymes in raw milk to decarboxylate the poison in Amanita muscaria, which is muscarine, to the hallucinogen, which is muscamol.
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mole and in wassons book on soma he discusses the fact that the soma whatever it was was whipped together with milk curd and allowed to stand and this was one of the major arguments for
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identifying it as amanita muscaria because that would make it much more palatable and less toxic
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but who knows how many of these things exist, you know,
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because we have lost the lore of special uses for animal organs
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and that sort of thing,
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and that really is shamanic lore that we’ve lost touch with.
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Are you familiar with the newt, the California newt,
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or the importance of the tetrodotoxin and the fugu.
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Perhaps maybe you could go a little bit into the fish, if you want,
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and, of course, the newt in that sense.
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Before we get into that much of a technical thing,
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I wonder if it’s possible to tell people why we think this is important.
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Can we just discuss that for a minute?
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Why is it important to track down these natural sources of the psychedelic experience?
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Yes.
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Well, it’s important because the psychedelic experience is important in and of itself.
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But it’s important to involve ourselves with these biological materials
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because the things which come out of the laboratory, of which there’s a potentially
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unlimited number, are not receiving the kind of animal and human testing that they would if they were above ground drugs. So safety is really a concern of mine.
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And what I’ve been telling people recently is that until there is animal and human data on a drug,
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it should probably be looked at very carefully. If you look at naturally occurring
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hallucinogens with a tradition of human
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use, you don’t have to worry
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about that because you, for instance,
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the mushrooms, we know that they were
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used in the mountains of Mexico
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for at least two millennia.
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Ditto
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the morning glories in Mexico.
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So in the
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absence of good scientific data
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about the effects of artificial hallucinogens,
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it’s good to stick to the natural ones.
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And it also, a more interesting and kind of more philosophical case
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can be made if you accept the theory of Rupert Sheldrake
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of morphogenetic fields,
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because you have to realize then that the morphogenetic field of a drug like psilocybin,
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which has been in living systems perhaps 120 million years, been used by human beings perhaps 20,000 years,
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what is its morphogenetic field going to be like
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contrasted to a drug made six weeks ago in the laboratory?
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It’s the depth of these things.
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You see, the new drugs are empty.
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They haven’t taken enough people yet to fill up.
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But what you see with something like psilocybin or morning glory
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seeds or something like that is the accumulation of the experience of all the people who ever took
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these things i mean that’s why you’re reaching back into a human family spread out over millennia
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and actually being those shaman you are those shaman or you are participating in the personality of the over-shaman, if you wish.
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So that is the basis for an ontological distinction
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between artificial and naturally occurring drugs of all types,
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but especially hallucinogens which have this intellectual content. Gee, that’s the best
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explanation of a
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case for organic
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psychedelics
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that I’ve heard. Stephen said a long
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time ago, when we were on the caravan
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12 years ago, I guess,
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that we should stop using LSD because
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so many people had used it in such paranoid
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circumstances
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that the vibrational rate was no longer such
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that you could know that you were going to have an ecstatic trip anymore.
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Well, that is an intuitive understanding of exactly what Shell Drake was saying.
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The reason I’ve been thinking about this recently
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was because I was at a conference recently on psychedelics,
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a closed conference mostly for health care professionals,
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and there was a lot of talk about ADAM, MDMA,
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and then someone asked the question,
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what is the LD50 of it?
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LD50 is a fairly unpleasant concept which is necessary to understand in pharmacology.
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The LD50 is the dose at which half the mice die or half the dogs die. And all drugs are
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tested this way. And what you want with a drug is a drug with where the LD 50 is hundreds or
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thousands of times more than the effective dose for instance the
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effective dose of psilocybin is about 20 milligrams the LD 50 for psilocybin is 375 milligrams per kilogram.
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So we’re talking 30,000 milligrams for a 145-pound human being.
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The problem that emerged with ADAM was that the LD50 is very close to the effective dose
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and that no human trials have ever been done.
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The effective dose of ADAM is considered to be somewhere between 75 and 150 milligrams.
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The LD50 is considered to be 500 milligrams based on studies of dogs.
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Now, let me explain this so it doesn’t sound too alarmist. Dogs are not good creatures
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to extrapolate to human beings. Practice has shown that mice are much better, that the LD50
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in mice will be more generally close to the LD50 in primates, including man, than data on dogs or cats.
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Nevertheless, in the absence of any human data whatsoever about ADAM,
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it’s very unnerving that the LD50 is so close to the effective dose.
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So immediately, the institution which was holding this conference,
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which probably would prefer to be anonymous, pledged 1,000.
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human volunteers who will clear their systems and then take it and then have massive blood work done.
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This is the short-term human data will come out of that.
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The long-term human data is beyond the financial capability of the underground.
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But you see, this is interesting, so let me take a moment,
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because it’s important for people. There’s only one drug in the world which is safe,
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strangely enough. In other words, there’s only one drug in the world that no one knows how much it takes to kill you. And that drug is LSD-25. And this is a very
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fortunate thing because people in the 1960s got into the habit, I remember Tim Leary said,
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when in doubt, double the dose. Completely reasonable advice for LSD. The problem is LSD is the only drug with such a benign profile,
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so that we can’t carry the dose estimation habits that we formed on LSD into these new amphetamines,
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like MDA, MDMA, ADAM, ecstasy,
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because it’s well known among chemists that the cyclicized amphetamines are toxic.
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Mescaline is the most toxic of all natural hallucinogens.
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MDMA is four times as toxic as mescaline
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So at this conference a great deal of thought was put into
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There were people there who were so enthusiastic about the effects of ADAM
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The psychological effects
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That they felt that this was the greatest chance the underground had ever had
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to actually obtain a quasi-legal or legal status for a hallucinogen.
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The problem is, this toxicological data makes it clear that it could never be legalized. And in fact, if Adam cured the common cold,
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it would not be legalized if it has a LD50 profile
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only four times the effective dose.
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So I had up until this time not formulated…
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I had had a preference for botanical drugs,
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but I had not formulated what is the real difference, you know.
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And when you would argue with people that synthetics and organic drugs were different,
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they could eventually argue you to the point where you just couldn’t defend it because they seemed to be the same.
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But with Sheldrake, the notion of Sheldrake, that the morphogenetic field attends
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the compound, and the absence mainly of human data. I mean, we went through a ketamine phase
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with moderate amounts of human data, although now I see in science news last week there’s
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fear that it depresses the immune system.
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In fact, it does depress the immune system.
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While leaving aside its use in the underground,
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the worst thing an anesthetic can do is depress your immune system
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because you’re going to have surgery and come out of surgery
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and be in a surgical recovery ward.
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You want your immune system to just be
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fully revved up now we have this problem apparently with adam and in fact there has been one reported
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death at a dose of 390 milligrams thanks for that information it’s really important to get out
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because there’s so much enthusiasm about i’m Well, I told Tom these things, and he was floored.
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I’m sure he was.
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And we had a long talk about it.
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And we have to take responsibility, you know, the underground,
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because we can’t have another drug scandal
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would finish psychedelic research above and underground for the rest of this century.
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So it’s a problem with the people’s courage.
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I mean, let’s contrast two drugs for a minute.
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Here we have psilocybin, effective at the 20 milligram dose,
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effective at the 20 milligram dose.
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And you would have to take, as I said,
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probably close to two and a half dried pounds of the mushrooms that are on sale in the Bay Area
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to approach the fatal dose.
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Nevertheless, if you take 40 milligrams of psilocybin,
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you will swear that you are at death’s door.
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You will swear that you are looking at the path to the bardo.
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But with Adam, it’s totally the feeling,
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the aura is that it’s completely benign
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even as you approach a fantastically dangerous dose it is amazing because adam
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puts you in the state of love even for itself that’s what happens and you know and i discussed
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this with lou coming down it seems to me that my experience with adam is that i’m so much in love
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in a state of love that it’s dangerous in other ways because I accept.
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Too much.
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I accept things that I shouldn’t really accept
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that aren’t the best for me.
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That’s right.
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So it’s some, boy, it’s fascinating.
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So I’ve heard of people who,
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essentially to become courageous enough to get really stoned,
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take Adam ahead of it. In other words, people say,
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well, I take Adam and then I take LSD an hour and a half later, or I take psilocybin an hour and a
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half later. Well, I think that these are, you know, in the absence of human data, this is all
00:22:37 ►
very chancy stuff. We have to realize that LSD was a godsent, special, miraculous case.
00:22:47 ►
I mean, it was amazing to pharmacologists that it was so non-toxic.
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The CIA gave an elephant six grams and, you know, it laid down for three days and then
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it got up and shook its head and wandered off to look for something to eat.
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So, but we must be more
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responsible. So I’ve actually formulated it down to a little test, which is, if you are interested
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in the spiritual path utilizing hallucinogens, then the hallucinogen you use should be
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able to answer yes
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to two of the following
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three questions.
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Does it have a history of shamanic
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usage?
00:23:36 ►
Does it occur in the tissue
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of a plant or animal?
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And now let me think.
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I can’t think of a good one.
00:23:48 ►
Ah.
00:23:50 ►
Does it bear a similarity to compounds that occur in our own brains?
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Well, we’re just discovering a lot of those compounds,
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so we don’t know them all yet.
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Well, but as I said, you have to be able to answer yes to two of three.
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So then…
00:24:04 ►
So LSD would actually pass two of those
00:24:06 ►
as far as the hallucinian mysteries
00:24:09 ►
where it was utilized for thousands of years
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and occurs in the brain.
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Well, and also it occurs in morning glories
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and ergotized rye.
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So…
00:24:20 ►
Yes.
00:24:23 ►
And if we do that, I don’t think we’ll get into trouble. And I also want to make you find out far more about what’s going on
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if you take a few drugs at progressively more and more heroic doses.
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Also, and I invite experimenters to try this,
00:25:01 ►
at the moment there is so much attention directed toward Adam
00:25:04 ►
that the morphogenetic field
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of adam is so strong that if you will take psilocybin you can request it to masquerade as
00:25:13 ►
adam and it will immediately turn over and be adam for you so and i don’t think Adam can do the same trick going the other way.
00:25:26 ►
Well, do you mind if I talk?
00:25:28 ►
I mean, please do join the conversation.
00:25:30 ►
I know you want to get more technical, but I want to save it a little bit.
00:25:34 ►
Well, that’s all I want to say.
00:25:36 ►
Well, I’ve got some questions.
00:25:39 ►
Oh, God.
00:25:40 ►
What did you just say about suicide?
00:25:41 ►
Oh, that it would turn over.
00:25:43 ►
Could you run down for people,
00:25:45 ►
if I understand you correctly, Terrence,
00:25:48 ►
I understand that you believe, or the reality that
00:25:53 ►
the spore of psilocybin mushrooms are alien intelligence
00:25:58 ►
or intelligence from other areas of the galaxy or universe.
00:26:04 ►
Would you tell us a little about that?
00:26:06 ►
Well, it’s not a belief of mine.
00:26:09 ►
It’s just a case, a case I make
00:26:12 ►
because I want to stretch the imaginations of evolutionary biologists
00:26:17 ►
and everybody else who’s looking at the living kingdom.
00:26:20 ►
And it is certainly true that spores appear to be genetically engineered for spaceflight.
00:26:28 ►
They are a color, deep purple.
00:26:31 ►
I’m now talking about the spores of Staphylocubensis.
00:26:34 ►
They’re a deep purple color which absorbs UV.
00:26:37 ►
That’s the color you would paint a spaceship.
00:26:41 ►
They survive best in conditions most like those of space.
00:26:48 ►
In other words, high vacuum, low temperature.
00:26:51 ►
They are small enough that they could, through Brownian motion
00:26:57 ►
and then the formation of global electrical currents
00:27:00 ►
forming on their surfaces high up in the atmosphere
00:27:04 ►
actually percolate out into
00:27:06 ►
outer space, much the way, for instance, much of the atmosphere of Mars has drifted away
00:27:12 ►
over millions of years.
00:27:15 ►
And I think that the experience, well, that’s basically a case for that they are a biological
00:27:22 ►
entity able to migrate between the stars by
00:27:26 ►
through utilizing convective flow and light pressure and that sort of thing.
00:27:31 ►
A more radical proposition based on the experience of psilocybin is that that organism is intelligent
00:27:41 ►
or that it is able to transfer information,
00:27:45 ►
that it is somehow a form of life which is able to communicate with us
00:27:50 ►
when it is locating in our nervous systems,
00:27:55 ►
that it comes to its fullest flower in the organism of a higher animal,
00:28:00 ►
and that in that state there is the potential for an I-Thou exchange and phenomenologically
00:28:09 ►
there’s no question about this that there is this I-Thou exchange with psilocybin but people can
00:28:16 ►
you know you can a psychologist can say well it’s an autonomous psychic component that has slipped
00:28:22 ►
out of the control of the ego and you’re dialoguing with that
00:28:26 ►
or whatever but i think when you’ve had the experience uh the overwhelming impression is
00:28:34 ►
that you are having a conversation with a very strange very old very different kind of organism. And based on that, and as I say, these physical arguments
00:28:48 ►
about the survivability of the spore and its adaptability to the outer space environment,
00:28:53 ►
I want to suggest that space may be no barrier to the migration of forms of, many forms of life,
00:29:03 ►
not just forms of life possessing spaceships,
00:29:07 ►
and that probably many times in the Earth’s history, spores have drifted down and become
00:29:13 ►
part of things. And this is not a radical theory at all. Crick of Crick and Watson holds the same view and believes that probably the galaxy is a biome,
00:29:27 ►
the galaxy is a biological unit,
00:29:30 ►
and we are just coming to the level of scientific
00:29:34 ►
and cultural awareness to recognize these things.
00:29:39 ►
And, of course, I think this argument seems preposterous
00:29:43 ►
unless you have had the experience on fairly high doses of psilocybin of actually meeting this alien entity, which is an experience very different from the classical the collective unconscious of Jung, dimensions ofocybin and DMT especially. These seem to be ways of communicating with a nearby world of alien intelligence
00:30:31 ►
which may or may not be space-based.
00:30:35 ►
It may be hyperdimensional or it may be earth-based.
00:30:38 ►
These may be the elves and fairies of folklore.
00:30:42 ►
The human experience is so bounded by language, we don’t realize
00:30:47 ►
how our scientific and linear expectations of the world hide from us the real complexity
00:30:56 ►
of what’s going on.
00:30:58 ►
Well, do you have something you would like to say or ask or comment on?
00:31:09 ►
How are we doing time-wise?
00:31:10 ►
No, go ahead.
00:31:11 ►
Okay.
00:31:12 ►
I didn’t mean to stop the show over there.
00:31:13 ►
That’s all right.
00:31:14 ►
I have a question then.
00:31:15 ►
In the experience of actual extraterrestrial intelligence embodied in form,
00:31:28 ►
which I’ve read and heard you describe before,
00:31:34 ►
is there a place where you go, I’m asking a question,
00:31:38 ►
in the psychedelic experience with psilocybin at any rate and DMT forms,
00:31:43 ►
with psilocybin at any rate in DMT forms where you go into the molecular form
00:31:47 ►
and then out another side that forms itself
00:31:52 ►
into forms that we’re not familiar with here in our 3D land.
00:31:55 ►
You actually go through the mandala.
00:31:58 ►
The molecular mandala.
00:31:59 ►
Well, I had never cognized it that way,
00:32:02 ►
but that’s an interesting way to think of it.
00:32:04 ►
It’s as though
00:32:05 ►
the molecule turns your mind through another dimension, and you see something which is
00:32:12 ►
co-present with reality, as it were, but between the spaces, sort of, and suddenly the phase
00:32:20 ►
shift occurs. I remember when I was a child, I had this toy,
00:32:26 ►
which was a flat piece of paper
00:32:28 ►
with a circus cage printed on it.
00:32:32 ►
And when you moved the bars one way,
00:32:34 ►
there was a zebra in the cage.
00:32:36 ►
When you slid the bars the other way
00:32:38 ►
and covered all the parts of the zebra,
00:32:40 ►
a tiger was revealed.
00:32:43 ►
And this is something about the nature of reality,
00:32:47 ►
that there seems to be at least one other continuum co-present. And this is why our
00:32:53 ►
folklore is haunted by elves, genies, djinns, afrits, demons demons all these curious creatures of folklore which
00:33:06 ►
you know wouldn’t be there
00:33:08 ►
if there was not some experiential
00:33:10 ►
basis for them it’s just that
00:33:12 ►
we have crowded into cities and then
00:33:14 ►
crowded into condominiums
00:33:16 ►
and we don’t experience what
00:33:18 ►
goes on with the single
00:33:20 ►
person in vast wilderness
00:33:22 ►
in a life lived
00:33:24 ►
based on experience of the present at hand rather
00:33:27 ►
than vast abstract systems of explanation dictated by science and government and that sort of thing
00:33:34 ►
would you would you like to comment at all on uh what do you think the psychedelic experience is
00:33:41 ►
with your knowledge of the chemistry of the plants and so forth and of
00:33:45 ►
the physiology of the body and the kind of experiences you’ve had do you have any idea
00:33:50 ►
what it is what what is it well i’ll tell you what i think it is but it’s not really based on
00:33:55 ►
physiology or pharmacology it’s based on carefully looking at the experience
00:34:01 ►
Plato said time is the moving image of eternity. And I think that what these psychedelics
00:34:08 ►
do is they actually do connect you to the whole circle. You stand outside of the moment
00:34:18 ►
from which you embarked on your psychedelic experience and you see eternity like a vast landscape deployed in
00:34:28 ►
front of you.
00:34:29 ►
So what I think psychedelics are is they’re about time, and they somehow make all time
00:34:37 ►
co-present.
00:34:38 ►
And how this is possible and why it’s possible, I don’t know. But I think perhaps this is what the myth of the fall is about, that what man’s fall is, is really the fall into time, the time of a fading past, an unknown future, and a very intense but very small area where things are going on called the
00:35:07 ►
present, there is some way in which that can be stepped out of.
00:35:13 ►
And it’s not an either-or situation.
00:35:18 ►
We are all to some degree in time and we are all to some degree in eternity.
00:35:25 ►
time and we are all to some degree in eternity and to the degree that we are in eternity we behave correctly and have right activity and right perception and
00:35:32 ►
these psychedelics enhance this involvement with the totality of
00:35:38 ►
everything that’s why it is not naive to suggest that issues like the nuclear gridlock
00:35:47 ►
and all these other terminal problems that we have could be overcome
00:35:53 ►
if people would by any means try to come into attunement with the notion of unity
00:36:00 ►
in time and space of the species and the planet and the solar system and and I think this is the
00:36:08 ►
the evolving
00:36:10 ►
core idea
00:36:12 ►
Which will either save us or the absence of its evolution will be our ruin
00:36:18 ►
the idea of unity and
00:36:21 ►
Interrelatedness I would like to suggest that it’s possible that both things are happening,
00:36:26 ►
that there is a universe where it’s unraveling
00:36:29 ►
and one where it’s already won.
00:36:32 ►
And wasn’t it you, Robert Anton Wilson,
00:36:37 ►
I know has talked about it some,
00:36:39 ►
suggested the future is already,
00:36:41 ►
it’s pulling us towards it.
00:36:43 ►
And I like that.
00:36:44 ►
And you talked about 1212 as a step over point.
00:36:47 ►
00:36:48 ►
2012, yeah.
00:36:49 ►
And I’ve told everybody that.
00:36:50 ►
And a few days ago, somebody told me
00:36:52 ►
that the Mayan fifth wheel, which we’re on now,
00:36:56 ►
ends in 2011, which I didn’t know.
00:36:59 ►
It actually ends in 2012.
00:37:01 ►
It ends on the 21st of December, 2012,
00:37:04 ►
just 30 days
00:37:06 ►
after the date that I picked
00:37:08 ►
from all the work we did with the I Ching.
00:37:10 ►
Yes, somehow…
00:37:11 ►
How did you do that?
00:37:14 ►
I can’t understand
00:37:15 ►
your book. I just can’t understand it.
00:37:19 ►
And I saw it in the I Ching,
00:37:20 ►
you know.
00:37:21 ►
But, yeah, the apocalypse
00:37:23 ►
is the millennium, and the psychedelics move you into the future.
00:37:29 ►
We are all occupying different places in historical time.
00:37:33 ►
I mean, some of us are completely uncivilized Neanderthals. are very uptight 18th century sort of people
00:37:45 ►
interested in the social contract
00:37:47 ►
and the obligations of class and party.
00:37:50 ►
And some of us are future people.
00:37:56 ►
And this is the whole,
00:37:57 ►
you don’t have to wait for society to move into the future.
00:38:01 ►
You can just make it happen around you.
00:38:03 ►
And if everyone did that, we could leap a thousand years into the future. You can just make it happen around you. And if everyone did that,
00:38:05 ►
we could leap a thousand years into the future.
00:38:08 ►
I try to tell people that.
00:38:09 ►
That’s one of the things that I say
00:38:11 ►
when people come on,
00:38:12 ►
oh, well, are we going to make it
00:38:13 ►
through the nuclear thing and stuff?
00:38:15 ►
And I say, listen, man, I’ve visited the future.
00:38:17 ►
I know there’s a future.
00:38:19 ►
I don’t know whether there’s one for you,
00:38:21 ►
but I’m sure there’s one for me
00:38:22 ►
because I’ve seen myself in it, right?
00:38:24 ►
And I keep coming back, and you keep coming back, and we all keep coming back.
00:38:28 ►
It’s because we’ve got a whole this great thing, and we want everybody to share it.
00:38:33 ►
But we have a few little things we work at ourselves on the way.
00:38:36 ►
Yes, well, by everybody by example, I think that the whole thing, the crux of the whole psychedelic issue is that it accentuates personal responsibility by making people take their own experiences seriously.
00:38:55 ►
People completely undervalue themselves.
00:38:59 ►
They think that they are spectators to life. They think that the great scientific breakthroughs, the great works of art, the great political upheavals will all be brought to them on the tube and explained by Newsweek.
00:39:13 ►
They don’t realize that all of that is illusion and that what is central is the immediacy of personal experience.
00:39:23 ►
is the immediacy of personal experience,
00:39:24 ►
and that if you work with that,
00:39:29 ►
you can just leave history and move off sideways from it and become your own Magellan.
00:39:31 ►
This is what people are doing in their living rooms,
00:39:34 ►
taking psilocybin in darkness late at night.
00:39:37 ►
They are the Columbuses of the new world of the human spirit.
00:39:44 ►
And by taking responsibility by abandoning the myth
00:39:49 ►
of um that science government the military and the churches are the forces which make culture
00:39:57 ►
and just realizing culture is what we’re doing at this very moment. The evolution of historical thought is what we’re doing at this very
00:40:05 ►
moment.
00:40:07 ►
Maybe before, I have one more
00:40:10 ►
thing and then I think that you
00:40:11 ►
ought to get a little technical before you
00:40:13 ►
have to go, but
00:40:14 ►
I always like to ask
00:40:17 ►
people if there’s something I haven’t
00:40:20 ►
asked that they feel people
00:40:21 ►
ought to hear right now at this
00:40:23 ►
place in the infinity sign
00:40:26 ►
no i’m very tricky i unburdened myself early on of what i wanted to say what i thought should be
00:40:35 ►
gotten let’s talk about just for a few minutes about your book on your cassette book and that
00:40:41 ►
and where people can order what’s in it what’s it about okay well it’s a
00:40:45 ►
book called i wrote a book called true hallucinations which was the story behind the
00:40:52 ►
invisible landscape the story of an amazing expedition to the amazon in the early 70s
00:40:58 ►
in which we met the saucers or at least i never wanted to meet them more closely than that, and discovered
00:41:07 ►
the mushroom, which we brought back, which we wrote our book about, and basically it’s
00:41:12 ►
just the wildest experience I’ve ever had or ever heard of, read onto eight cassettes
00:41:21 ►
as a nine-and-a-half-hour talking book with wonderful special effects and musical backgrounding and that sort of thing.
00:41:31 ►
Thank you.
00:41:32 ►
Thank you, first of all, Liz.
00:41:33 ►
I think people like you are really the shock troops of the new order
00:41:37 ►
because the whole thing that we’re all doing is information,
00:41:41 ►
and the radio is very, very important.
00:41:46 ►
I know.
00:41:46 ►
That’s why I’ve got to get it together to package this program
00:41:49 ►
and send it out around.
00:41:50 ►
I want to send it to those spots in the United States
00:41:55 ►
that have enough aware population to enjoy it.
00:41:59 ►
I think there are probably 30 to 50 of them anyway.
00:42:02 ►
Well, you may get better, but you’re just fine the way you are.
00:42:06 ►
Oh, yeah, well, I know.
00:42:08 ►
It’s an all-win situation.
00:42:11 ►
So do you want to go back to where you were talking about,
00:42:15 ►
because that led us into why organic stuff.
00:42:19 ►
We were talking about…
00:42:19 ►
Oh, we were talking about cauldron chemistry.
00:42:21 ►
The shamanic anatomy of it, yeah.
00:42:24 ►
Ta-da-da!
00:42:26 ►
Well, there are many.
00:42:31 ►
An interesting thing to think about in regard to shamanism and all that is that there may be many situations where natural products can be combined
00:42:38 ►
to make a powerful hallucinogen, where the components themselves are not.
00:42:44 ►
The most obvious known example of that is ayahuasca in the Amazon,
00:42:49 ►
where DMT in Socotria viridis is potentiated by taking MAO-inhibiting harmine from Banisteriopsis capi.
00:42:59 ►
But there may be many potentials for these kinds of things.
00:43:03 ►
But there may be many potentials for these kinds of things.
00:43:09 ►
For instance, why were the Druids so interested in mistletoe? Let’s look at the chemistry of mistletoe and try to imagine ways in which mistletoe might be brought in that direction.
00:43:17 ►
The Arundo Donox case is another one.
00:43:19 ►
The Chinese, many of the mushrooms in the Chinese pharmacopoeia could be looked at as well.
00:43:27 ►
Ayurvedic medicine, there are traces of combinatory hallucinogens.
00:43:32 ►
So this is actually an area where not a lot of work has been done.
00:43:35 ►
And in fact, generally, synergies have not been studied.
00:43:40 ►
Synergies are a situation where two compounds are put together to get an effect. And even pharmaceutically and medically,
00:43:49 ►
the synergies that occur with various drugs have not been well studied.
00:43:54 ►
There are a few areas that I’ve spent some time thinking about.
00:43:59 ►
One of the most is what I call lower life form biochemical conversion processes
00:44:06 ►
or ways in which things are transmitted perhaps from termites through termitomyces
00:44:15 ►
through tool making behavior and chimpanzees
00:44:21 ►
through that this transfer of information occurs and continues to occur,
00:44:26 ►
and so that each organism perhaps in its combination, the flies which are stupefied by muscaria as it discaze,
00:44:33 ►
are eaten by the frogs whose legs in turn are, and so there’s a lore or a processing that goes on in that way,
00:44:42 ►
as one form. The other is a chromopuncture,
00:44:45 ►
an area that the body is selectively sensitive
00:44:48 ►
to certain colors,
00:44:52 ►
to certain chemicals in certain areas,
00:44:55 ►
and that this is another area
00:44:57 ►
that isn’t really understood
00:44:59 ►
or hasn’t been looked into.
00:45:00 ►
No, you make a very good point.
00:45:03 ►
The other would be olfactory intoxicants.
00:45:05 ►
There’s a critical timing and involvement, I think, that has to go on in order to optimize
00:45:13 ►
an experience. And I think the olfactory component is one that needs to be considered.
00:45:30 ►
considered pheromones are aromatic compounds which are message-bearing chemicals that insects give off but plants also give off pheromones and in fact the more it’s looked
00:45:37 ►
into the more it appears that everything is giving off pheromones. And the plainer nature of hallucinogens
00:45:47 ►
suggests that they may be, in some sense,
00:45:50 ►
natural hallucinogens, super pheromones.
00:45:53 ►
They are actually message-bearing compounds
00:45:56 ►
whose purpose is to communicate
00:45:59 ►
between one species and another
00:46:01 ►
or within a species.
00:46:03 ►
For instance, the language of insects is not a language of sound,
00:46:08 ►
but a language of chemical excretion.
00:46:11 ►
And how complex this language is, we don’t know,
00:46:14 ►
because we can’t pierce into it.
00:46:16 ►
But I studied for a while under Dr. Ralph Foddy,
00:46:21 ►
who was a great geographer and medical epidemiologist,
00:46:26 ►
Dr. Ralph Foddy, who was a great geographer and medical epidemiologist, and he suggested that hallucinogens should be looked upon as a subset of pheromones. And I know when you’re
00:46:34 ►
in the Amazon, you just breathe this air which is laden with thousands of chemical messengers of all sorts that are setting the ambiance of the whole biosphere.
00:46:49 ►
And this has not been looked at. It’s not well understood. There was an amazing article written
00:46:56 ►
a few years ago by a man named Harry Wiener, who wrote an article called External Chemical
00:47:02 ►
Messengers, ECM he called them,
00:47:08 ►
in the New York Journal of Medicine.
00:47:14 ►
And he outlined a whole theory of how this regulated species and interspecies relations.
00:47:18 ►
He talked about how when you walk into a room full of people,
00:47:24 ►
you get an immediate gestalt impression, which he felt was olffactory that you were sensing the psychic conditions
00:47:27 ►
of everyone by taking a lungful of the message laden chemicals that everybody was exuding
00:47:33 ►
he talked about psychiatrists who would diagnose schizophrenia by smell they would just walk over
00:47:41 ►
to the person and take a hit of their body odor and felt, you know, that…
00:47:48 ►
And he even suggested that what perhaps some forms of schizophrenia are is miscuing socially because your pheromone system is haywire.
00:47:59 ►
So you’re giving off what can only be described as a weird vibe,
00:48:07 ►
and so people relate to you weirdly,
00:48:10 ►
and that makes you weirder, and it makes them weirder, and you get this feedback lock,
00:48:12 ►
and it’s essentially because your invisible exochemical messenger computer is broken down.
00:48:23 ►
What I was thinking was
00:48:25 ►
if we could get back a little bit to the
00:48:27 ►
combination of the
00:48:28 ►
let’s say the tryptamine, the DMT
00:48:31 ►
and the haramine
00:48:33 ►
or those combinations
00:48:34 ►
and also to get to the fugu
00:48:37 ►
I know
00:48:38 ►
very little about it and it would be nice
00:48:41 ►
if you have some thoughts
00:48:43 ►
on the chemistry of the fugu
00:48:45 ►
and the newt.
00:48:45 ►
What is the fugu?
00:48:47 ►
It’s the fish that’s eaten in Japan.
00:48:50 ►
Yes, I don’t know actually anything about that particular fish.
00:48:54 ►
I know that there are fish eaten off Norfolk Island, which is an island off the west coast
00:49:00 ►
of Australia.
00:49:01 ►
In fact, there’s an amazing description of a trip in Hoffer and Osman’s book,
00:49:07 ►
How Lucinogens,
00:49:08 ►
this person,
00:49:11 ►
this happened in the early 60s.
00:49:13 ►
They saw a monument
00:49:16 ►
to the first landing on the moon
00:49:19 ►
and had all these super science fiction visions
00:49:22 ►
of the future
00:49:23 ►
that they had not expected to get high.
00:49:26 ►
It was an accidental.
00:49:27 ►
They had caught this fish, roasted it on the beach, and ate it.
00:49:31 ►
And in Hawaii, there are similar fish.
00:49:35 ►
And about six species are implicated.
00:49:37 ►
And I think in all cases, DMT is the compound.
00:49:40 ►
But not a lot of animal tissue contains
00:49:44 ►
utilizable amounts of hallucinogens. For instance,
00:49:48 ►
I don’t think it’s ever, no hallucinogenic insect has ever been confirmed, although there are
00:49:54 ►
persistent reports of a grub, a palm grub, an immature beetle form in Brazil, which is
00:50:03 ►
hallucinogenic, and occasionally butterflies are mentioned as hallucinogenic,
00:50:08 ►
but it’s never been confirmed.
00:50:11 ►
So this is an area where research needs to be done.
00:50:16 ►
If one were to be able to make, say, DMT from rabbit lungs
00:50:23 ►
and were able to obtain the harmine from the Russian thistle
00:50:28 ►
or the other plants, how would one proceed in terms of combining these in the most effective
00:50:37 ►
way?
00:50:38 ►
Well, you want MAO inhibition, so you have to take an effective dose of the MAO inhibitor.
00:50:46 ►
And then the DMT is usually potentiated at a dose lower than the effective dose without the MAO inhibitor.
00:50:55 ►
And probably, since these things are degraded substantially in the gut,
00:51:01 ►
the most effective way of doing it would be to smoke it.
00:51:12 ►
Or sublingual absorption is also a direct route that avoids the degradation in the digestive system.
00:51:16 ►
And that is where the recording ended.
00:51:19 ►
Interestingly, the first question asked was for detailed information about a particular drug extraction
00:51:25 ►
method, and their conversation also ended with down-to-earth information about psychedelic
00:51:31 ►
substances. And that is how Terence became so well known back then. Believe it or not,
00:51:37 ►
he was just about the only person who was brave enough to talk about these substances in public.
00:51:43 ►
Fortunately, times have changed. And now I want
00:51:47 ►
to do something that I’ve never done before, and that is to dedicate this podcast to one of our
00:51:53 ►
earliest fellow salonners. Her name was Marjean McKenna, and no, she was not even related to
00:52:00 ►
Terrence. I first got to know Marjean many years ago, back when I was doing annual fund
00:52:06 ►
drives to pay the hosting bills. And when I saw her name as a donor, I wrote and asked if she was
00:52:12 ►
related to Terrence and Dennis. Well, as it turned out, they weren’t related, but she did live not
00:52:17 ►
far from where Terrence and Dennis grew up. Now, there were two years in a row when money was
00:52:23 ►
really tight here in the salon,
00:52:25 ►
and it didn’t look as if I’d raise enough in donations to keep from dipping into my savings again.
00:52:31 ►
Then Marjean came through.
00:52:34 ►
Not just once, but for two years in a row,
00:52:36 ►
it was Marjean McKenna’s large contributions that saved the day and kept these podcasts coming.
00:52:43 ►
Now, that must have been over 10 years or so ago.
00:52:46 ►
Her friend Tammy let me know last week
00:52:48 ►
that Marjean died this spring.
00:52:52 ►
Her spirit will always be an important part of the salon.
00:52:56 ►
Sail on, dear soul.
00:53:00 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off
00:53:03 ►
from Cyberdelic Space.
00:53:05 ►
Namaste, my friends.