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Podcast 698 – Uncomfortable About Psychedelics?

Mar 21, 2024, 54 min read

Program Notes

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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

Today begins our 20th year of podcasting from the Psychedelic Salon with a talk that Terence McKenna gave in the late 1980s. Near the end he talks about his daily cannabis use and how he and Kat got together. As far as I can remember, this is his only time that he got so personal.

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Transcript

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Three-dimensional, transforming, musical, linguistic objects.

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Now, let’s go.

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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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Now, today’s podcast begins my 20th year

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of podcasting from here in the salon, and I want to thank you for being here with me because,

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well, if it wasn’t for you, I still wouldn’t be doing these podcasts.

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And appropriately, I’ll begin with another talk by Terrence McKenna. A friend of mine gave me

00:00:41 ►

some old tapes that he had, and he told me that Terrence gave this same talk, or at least one that is very similar, on more than one occasion.

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So hopefully I haven’t already podcasted.

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As you know, I’ve done that at least once before, but hey, there are over 300 McKenna Talks here in the salon.

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So it’s easy, for me at least, to make a mistake like that.

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In any event, it’s always fun to listen to Terrence,

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even if we’ve heard it before. And since we are at the beginning of a new season of the Salon’s

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podcast, I’m going to do something different. In deference to those among us who would rather not

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listen to my long introductions, well, I’m going to skip right to the talk. So here’s Terrence.

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Well, I’m going to skip right to the talk.

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So, here’s Terrence.

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I loved what you said about, is it all right to feeling restless with psychedelics?

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It reminds me of a story that a friend of mine told me recently.

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His father, this is a man 40 years old, a psychotherapist,

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his father said to him, I want to ask you a question, a very serious question.

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But before I ask this question,

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I want you to understand that the answer to this question is no.

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Okay?

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So the answer to this question is no. Okay. So the answer to this question is no. It’s very important to me that I ask you this question. Okay. So what’s the question? So the question is, have you Thank you, I feel very relieved.

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But still, having done these things for now nearly ten years with greater and lesser frequency and thinking about it,

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I do see that it changes and it deepens.

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And what it seems to do is to encompass more and more.

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I don’t know whether that’s because all this raving about creating an alternative language

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or an alternative vocabulary of description is actually beginning to happen

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and to feed back upon itself.

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happen and to feed back upon itself but to my mind the issue of psychedelics in society has been steadily changing and transmuting itself over the past 10 or

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15 years and very independently of what’s going on with the so-called drug problem,

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which is a whole other set of issues, issues of the schizophrenia of institutions, the

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way in which institutions are habituated to various kinds of activity, such as making money.

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The psychedelic phenomenon as a part of the drug phenomenon is probably 5 or 6 percent of what is going on.

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In terms of money made, I’m sure it’s even less. It’s nothing. It just is not a factor.

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And yet the psychedelics are always included

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as part of the scourge that is sweeping over mankind.

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I think that there is a drug problem

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and that there is not going to be a solution

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until there is an honest rethinking of not only what these things are doing to society,

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but we are being asked by the culture crisis generally

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to revision our relationship to the planet

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and to the cultural fate that we appear to be set up for as a legacy of our historical antecedents.

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We’re being asked to revision exactly what we think nature is.

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Nature as we inherit it out of our tradition is just something to be pillaged and used. It’s a resource and it’s to be mined, cut down, and sold as an object of commerce.

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The psychedelics have, I think over the past 15 years or so,

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have, I think, over the past 15 years or so, taken on this strange ecological resonance, if you want.

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In the 1960s, when people were taking LSD, it was presented basically as instant psychotherapy. It was about getting into yourself, recovering traumatic material,

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recovering traumatic material and it was also sort of

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represented as an aesthetic aphrodisiac

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or something

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you would take low doses

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and look at paintings by Hieronymus Bosch

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and Van Gogh

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and have an insight into art

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which to some degree this was true

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but what was absent from that whole view of

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the psychedelic experience was any realization that it came out of nature

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that it was a statement about the beauty resident in nature in the same way that

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an abalone shell or a tropical butterfly or a sea anemone is a

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statement about the order and beauty that is in nature. The reason this was not apparent in the

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first wave of the psychedelic research was because LSD was the paradigm compound. But the reason LSD was the paradigm compound, but the reason LSD was in that role was simply that it was very easy to make a lot of it so that it was available for research.

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This is a consideration when we forget that because we live in an era of restricted drug research where for a researcher to possess a thousand grams of a compound is a lot

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but when serious research is done a lot of the of the experimental compound is needed and lsd

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fell into that category but this to my mind postponed the realization that the psychedelic experience is primarily

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an aesthetic experience in the same category as windsurfing, climbing high mountains,

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scuba diving, going to the Amazon jungle or the Great Barrier Reef or that sort of thing.

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In other words, it’s an inspection of nature, of natural beauty.

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There is the psycholitic function, the dissolving of neuroses

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and the opening to connection to other people

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and all the things which excited the therapists.

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But I think beyond that, in the so-called transpersonal realm,

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when you analyze the content of the transpersonal experience as delivered by plant psychedelics,

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it is inevitably this Gaia-like affirmation of the fertility and fecundity

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and mutually reinforcing stability and ongoingness of the living world.

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Light is a theme which is prevalent in all cultures,

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and the great Western thrust toward the definition of monotheism and ethical constancy

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and and the notion of the union the possibility of the union of divinity with the individual human

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expression all of this can be traced back or takes great energy from the

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Iranian light religions that flourished in Central Asia in the fourth millennia

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and in the Amazon light is associated with sexual energy and fecundity and

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power the magical objects that are moved through hyperspace,

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whatever that means, through the psychedelic mind space,

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are objects made of light.

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Light is something we invoke whenever we strive to express

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the notion of well-intended communications.

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Then we say, he made himself clear.

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She painted a picture.

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I see what you mean.

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So light is somehow sensed by us as an ideal.

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We can even talk about physical light. Light is made of photons.

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If you know anything about the physics of elementary particles, you know that the photon is the only

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particle without an antiparticle. It is somehow unitary within itself. It doesn’t require its antithesis in order to come into existence.

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And I think it’s possible to take very seriously, some of you are familiar, and we will touch on

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all these things in more detail. I’m just flashing the cards before your eyes. But the tradition of the circulation of the light that is so highly developed in Taoist yoga,

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circulation of the light and the building of a light body as a vehicle to use to travel across the dangerous transition area between life and death

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and then into some kind of immortal realm.

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What has always fascinated me personally about the psychedelic experience

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has been the hallucinations.

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I mean, in my book, it just doesn’t make it if there aren’t hallucinations.

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And people argue this and say well you have wonderful realizations tremendous

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feelings openings of the heart yes all yes but there is something about this function because it is information that is so pregnant with the intent of being

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apprehended that it chooses to organize itself into the visual field you know it

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can’t be held back it chooses to manifest itself. And it is a stunning affirmation of what? I’m not sure. I mean,

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that’s, I guess, what our life’s compass is about. For sure, it’s a stunning affirmation

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of the presence of alien beauty, at least within reach of the human mind.

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I mean, I don’t want to say in the human mind

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because we’re not sure that it’s in the human mind.

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Some of this stuff is so peculiar

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that you only believe it’s in the human mind

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because that’s the simplest hypothesis.

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But it isn’t necessarily the one

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that springs immediately to intuition.

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Sometimes the hypothesis which springs immediately to intuition is, this could not possibly be the

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product of my mind or the mind of any other human being, because it is so peculiar. But the vocabulary for dealing with hallucination is, if anything,

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even more impoverished than our vocabulary for dealing with emotion. I sort of use hallucination

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as a general term for a group of phenomena which become progressively more three-dimensional and real.

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In other words, what some people mean by hallucination is,

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we could all just do an exercise here where you press lightly, but press on your eyes,

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and you will see labyrinthine-like patterns of chartreuse light,

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labyrinthine-like patterns of chartreuse light,

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or in some cases, lavender light organized in a kind of maze-like pattern.

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Those are called phosphenes,

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and are actually the result of physical pressure related into the chemistry of the eye. I have a bit of a problem with the word hallucination, too.

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I prefer the word visions or visual images, because hallucination means seeing something that’s not really there.

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Well, let me develop it here because at the end I agree with you.

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So you start out with these things, the phosphenes.

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Yeah.

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Then you get what are called hypnagogia.

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Then you get what are called hypnagogia.

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Hypnagogia are trivial.

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Dancing mice, little candies, autumn leaves, I mean, you know, straws, stuff. And it seems to have, I mean, I suppose one could psychoanalyze it, but who wants to bother?

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but who wants to bother? The main thing that typifies hypnagogia

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is its lack of engaging content for the person experiencing it.

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It is inevitably trivial.

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But at some point, the hypnagogia gives way

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to something that is more demanding and more present,

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that is more demanding and more present.

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And it comes like a wave in my experience.

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And it sometimes begins as a thought which ends as a picture without ever crossing over an actual moment of transition.

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But in any case, this is is vision now you’re playing in the

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major leagues this is what william blake was talking about this is not where you see geometric

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shapes and shifting fields of color but you see you know stygian lakes and shattered ruins of alien civilizations and bizarre vegetable machine forms that are transforming themselves.

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And the key concept here is information.

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Everything, this is real stuff.

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It has history. It has a future.

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It has some kind of relation to the other objects in its world.

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And this is what has…

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It’s this place that I call truly psychedelic.

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It’s this place that I strive to attend to every time I take a psychedelic.

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It’s possible to have a fairly deep involvement with psychedelics and actually never

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have experienced this. And I’m not sure why that is. I think it has to do with fear of, number one,

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taking sufficient amount of the substance, then fear of creating the environment where the substance can fully expose itself

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because the environment in which to meet it is silent darkness.

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And people, you know, go bowling.

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They go out to see a movie.

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They watch David Letterman.

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I mean, it’s true.

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I mean, we’ve given workshops where it was specifically to be about psilocybin

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or something like that.

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And first question off the bat is,

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will I be able to drive?

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In all senses, you will not be able to drive.

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And you can’t even have a friend drive either.

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Just forget that.

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You can’t even have a friend drive either.

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Just forget that.

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So, and this vision stuff really, I never really got it with LSD.

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The only way I could have the kind of experience that I wanted with LSD was to smoke a lot of very good hash with it.

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And then there seemed to be like a clash or a

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synergy that would set up a standing wave in the visual cortex, who knows where. But anyway, then

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suddenly there would be outlandish data in the visual field. And with what I call the true psychedelics is actually a very limited field a very limited

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family of drugs these tryptamine drugs psilocybin DMT 5-methoxy DMT and then the combinations of these with MAO inhibitors. Now, the thing which distinguishes this family

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is that they are very closely related to normal brain metabolism. They all occur in plants,

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and they all have a history of shamanic usage already established somewhere in the world. So though in some corners my reputation is that

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of a wild man who says, you know, you should take anything to get high. Actually, it’s not true. I’m

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an extremely conservative person advocating that this small family, which includes DMT and the mushrooms and so forth be given be

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examined as a separate phenomenon really the whole thing which contaminates all

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discussions at every level of the drug issue is the fact that we should just

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get rid of the word drug because it’s too broad it means too many things I

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mean there are drug opportunities available to society as well as drug problems. You know, you have to name the drug you’re talking about rather than just run around with this kind of chicken little attitude toward what is going on. Yeah, Robert.

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what is going on.

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Yeah, Robert.

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I don’t know whether you want to get into this issue sometime later on,

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but it’s related to the question of hallucinations.

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And a question that I have

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is trying to determine

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when a vision is a source of external information versus, quote, simply an internal

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reaction of the body. That is the analogy being that normally we see outside when it’s light

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outside and not much on the inside, and that the use of a psychedelic

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is turning a light on in the inside and what we’re really getting is a mirror reflection

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and all of this is really the phosphine thing at a higher level and therefore instances

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such as near death experiences when you see something, these are very common among people.

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So to what, how do you, or do we want to delay this question, on what evidence do we have that this is an external plant-mediated intelligence of some sort?

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Well, this is a real problem.

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Well, this is a real problem. You would think we would, it’s almost like a Sufi conundrum of some sort. I mean, you would think we would be able to figure it out. and a few minutes later someone comes in and sits next to you and they lean across the table and say

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I’m an extraterrestrial now you should be able then to have a conversation with them at the end

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of which you are satisfied that they either are or are not telling the truth because of the quality

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of your questioning should elicit the truth in this matter.

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The fact is it’s bloody hard to tell,

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and that it raises the most profound questions of self and world,

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of language and identity, of meaning and intent,

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because ultimately what it exposes is that we don’t know what we are.

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And not knowing who we are, we are not able to tell who anybody else is.

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So it pushes us to a new effort at self-definition.

00:22:21 ►

I don’t know. This is interesting to me.

00:22:29 ►

self-definition i don’t know this is interesting to me i it’s interesting uh that it’s such a persistent problem and that you basically it’s a religious matter you decide well uh it’s a product

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of psyche it’s in the psyche or you decide it isn’t ultimately it doesn’t really matter because the truth about the psychedelic experience

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from my point of view is if it is not an extraterrestrial, then extraterrestrials have to take second

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place to whatever it is.

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It is not necessary to name it in order to grapple with it.

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It is, without a doubt, the most unlikely and the strangest object in the human universe.

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I mean, we just don’t know what to make of it because it operates on us personally.

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You know, I mean, quarks are strange, but who has ever seen one?

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And, you know, certain things are going on in, I don’t know, topology or somewhere.

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I mean, we do, there are odd corners of the universe, but the psychedelic experience is

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available to anyone, and it’s utterly confounding of the assumptions of the world in which we’re living.

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Now, it’s possible to go from birth to death without ever having a psychedelic experience,

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or maybe you get it at death.

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But in other words, it’s possible to live your life in utter blissful ignorance of the fact that your body is capable of delivering you into a place

00:24:09 ►

100% different than reality.

00:24:13 ►

Well, that’s big news, I would think.

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And, you know, why then are we in this funny position of not wanting to hear about this?

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Or of some of us being impassioned to spread the word about it

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and others not wanting to hear about it?

00:24:32 ►

What’s going on here?

00:24:33 ►

How much monkey politics is operating around the issue of the fact

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that there are doorways in nature into other dimensions.

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I mean, you can argue, well, what do you mean by dimension?

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But the fact of the matter is utter transcendent mysteries

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that when you stand in the face of them, no matter who you are,

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you can’t fail to be awestruck and moved.

00:25:04 ►

Well, I guess what’s amazing to me about that is

00:25:08 ►

I assumed growing up I was raised Catholic

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and inculcated into a 2,000-year-old utterly dead religion

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where maybe Thomas Merton was getting off,

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but I wasn’t getting off.

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And the rational faith was scientific

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realism backed up by pragmatism and materialism and the basic message was

00:25:33 ►

there is no magic there is no magic you know you’re in childhood and this is the

00:25:41 ►

last magic you’ll ever know well the, the psychedelics say, you know,

00:25:48 ►

there’s more magic than you can handle,

00:25:51 ►

that you are going to have to choose to turn your face away from magic

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because it’s there in this one confined area.

00:26:01 ►

Now, I don’t know what’s going on with Babaji and the Roshis and the Rishis,

00:26:08 ►

and I suspect that what’s going on is they’re still spinning the bicycle wheel that was set

00:26:14 ►

going by Soma and Teanana Kato and sacramental plants in use millennia ago. I am a maverick in that I’m not at all into the idea that there’s a lineage

00:26:29 ►

and that you should sweep my front porch for 10 years and then I’ll turn you on to something far

00:26:36 ►

out. It seems to me much better to tell all the secrets,

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to admit that nobody’s holding any aces,

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nobody has figured it out yet,

00:26:55 ►

and we need to look at the cards that are on the table and act from that.

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And when you do that,

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I think you find yourself involved in music.

00:27:03 ►

I certainly wish I was more involved in music.

00:27:06 ►

In the psychedelic experience, in cultivating yourself as a lover for somebody else, in art.

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In other words, in immediate experience.

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immediate experience, not buying these guiding images that are being impressed upon us from above by Madison Avenue and television and so forth and so on. They need to view us as an atomic system,

00:27:39 ►

meaning as millions of interchangeable small parts, because that’s the perfect kind of customer.

00:27:46 ►

But that’s an inhuman definition of what we are.

00:27:49 ►

That’s an institutional definition.

00:27:52 ►

Good for the institution, bad for us as people.

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What we need to recognize is that that is just a fiction of the capitalist system.

00:28:02 ►

And what we really are is extremely unique expressions

00:28:06 ►

of a mystery even greater than ourselves

00:28:11 ►

so that we are like, if you will,

00:28:14 ►

tiny fractal buds off the main body of the fractal mystery.

00:28:22 ►

All of the mystery comes together in us. The mystery of mind,

00:28:32 ►

the mystery of the union of the past to the future in a kind of ever-changing but always

00:28:39 ►

stable and defining present. In the mystery of communication, what is that, how can that happen,

00:28:47 ►

through language, all of these things that are truly compelling and truly mysterious

00:28:55 ►

come tangential in the human heart and the human mind. So that means you don’t have to go to the National Laboratory at Brookhaven or

00:29:07 ►

the South Pole or the moon to explore an edge or a frontier the major edge is the

00:29:15 ►

edge of the human spirit and we each have a piece of that action so by it’s

00:29:23 ►

very hard if you see things that way

00:29:25 ►

to then not see the psychedelics as being something

00:29:29 ►

that you bring on into the arena of your life.

00:29:35 ►

Your life is an arena of risk and opportunity.

00:29:41 ►

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

00:29:44 ►

You know, the goal of life is not to get through it

00:29:49 ►

some people seem to have that approach what they spend their life doing is arranging things so that

00:29:57 ►

the deathbed scene is perfect the bed is huge the family is gathered

00:30:05 ►

the estates are manicured in all directions

00:30:09 ►

and then you just give your few final observations

00:30:14 ►

and that’s it

00:30:16 ►

many people think this way

00:30:22 ►

it’s an arena of risk and opportunity It’s, many people think this way.

00:30:27 ►

It’s an arena of risk and opportunity,

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and I say I don’t know how much you could win if you got on a roll, you know.

00:30:43 ►

You might be able to parlay a win that would carry all of us right into some other kind of world.

00:30:45 ►

It’s really up for grabs.

00:30:50 ►

The main thing I think that draws people to this rap and to the psychedelics in their own life

00:30:53 ►

when they interpret it anywhere close to these ideas

00:30:56 ►

is its permission for hope.

00:31:00 ►

It’s a wild card.

00:31:02 ►

It says you don’t know what is actually going on,

00:31:05 ►

and that means that there may be opportunities for miracles.

00:31:10 ►

It seems like there are opportunities for miracles.

00:31:13 ►

So it legitimates a kind of hope that all these other models of the world are running against.

00:31:31 ►

the world are running against. I often think of what Robert Anton Wilson said about power elites.

00:31:40 ►

He said, I define the power elite as myself and my friends. If I didn’t define the power elite as myself and my friends, I’d be living in a loser’s scenario. Who wants to be a loser?

00:31:49 ►

And I think what people who are involved in these kinds of considerations know is that the bottom

00:31:56 ►

line here is magic, that the evolution of the historical future is up for grabs. There is a curious law operating which says that the best vision of the future will win.

00:32:15 ►

I really believe this, that beauty is what rises to the surface,

00:32:20 ►

that in the so-called competition of the paradigms and the search for a new world

00:32:25 ►

order it’s the person who’s going to tell the best story who’s going to carry

00:32:31 ►

us all along into this future and it behooves each of us then to give it our

00:32:36 ►

best shot these are what are called memes you can think of them as viruses

00:32:41 ►

they are linguistic structures which make their way out into society

00:32:47 ►

and compete against other means in a process of, in some cases, natural selection,

00:32:53 ►

in other cases, symbiotic reinforcement,

00:32:56 ►

but as a mirror image of what goes on in the biological world.

00:33:09 ►

biological world and what I’ve seen is that there is so much beauty in the psychedelic experience when you get it sliced right and coming at you just

00:33:13 ►

perfectly tuned that I’m sure it will win I’m sure that somehow the best story

00:33:20 ►

that can be told will have the psychedelic experience set in it like a jewel.

00:33:26 ►

Yeah?

00:33:27 ►

When you were pointing out a group of tryptamine drugs, DMT,

00:33:33 ►

do you not consider LSD to be part of that?

00:33:38 ►

Doesn’t LSD have a tryptamine structure?

00:33:42 ►

Well, LSD is sort of a special case. It’s sort of half in

00:33:46 ►

and half out of the natural

00:33:48 ►

world. LSD

00:33:50 ►

occurs in morning glories

00:33:52 ►

and in

00:33:53 ►

Asian

00:33:55 ►

families of wood rose-like

00:33:58 ►

plants. But the

00:34:00 ►

LSD, which Hoffman discovered,

00:34:02 ►

was isolated from a fungus,

00:34:04 ►

an ergot-dwelling smut,

00:34:08 ►

which isn’t to put it down.

00:34:11 ►

It’s just that’s what it’s called.

00:34:16 ►

Smuts, slimes, and something else in that family.

00:34:22 ►

But we shouldn’t malign the slimes.

00:34:26 ►

Never malign a slime because they’re a wonderful example

00:34:30 ►

of how organisms can evolve themselves

00:34:35 ►

into collectivities.

00:34:38 ►

LSD is, I think, sort of in a special category.

00:34:43 ►

There are special categories,

00:34:46 ►

you know, other special categories.

00:34:53 ►

For instance, some of you may know about detoura, tropane alkaloids. These occur in detoura, jimson weed, the arborescent detouras

00:35:00 ►

that are horticulturally sold as landscaping

00:35:05 ►

and are used in shamanism in South America

00:35:08 ►

and are very strong mind-altering compounds,

00:35:13 ►

but not interesting to me.

00:35:16 ►

They are more like delirium,

00:35:19 ►

and there’s a forgetting of what goes on that’s troubling.

00:35:23 ►

and there’s a forgetting of what goes on that’s troubling.

00:35:30 ►

People have different intentions with these things.

00:35:33 ►

For instance, you probably all know the work of Stan Grof. Well, LSD was wonderful for Stan’s work

00:35:37 ►

because it really, I think, accentuates the power to recover traumatic material,

00:35:45 ►

accentuates the power to recover traumatic material,

00:35:52 ►

the power to be present with your own memories and your own breathing,

00:35:54 ►

and that sort of thing.

00:36:05 ►

The tryptamines that interest me are sort of beyond the problem of the neurotic personality.

00:36:09 ►

You know, Jung had this notion that psychic health was something that went on until the day you died,

00:36:12 ►

that what individuation meant

00:36:14 ►

was continuous growth and transcendence,

00:36:18 ►

and that it isn’t that there is neurotic and psychotic

00:36:22 ►

and then we’re healthy.

00:36:29 ►

It’s no, that of course you’re not psychotic of course you’re not neurotic what you want to be is ever self-transcending and growing and this is the

00:36:35 ►

task of a lifetime it never ends and you have to constantly keep fine-tuning it and examining your motives and how you’re being in the world.

00:36:46 ►

And the tryptamines seem to be the real shamanic, if you will, or adventuring, if you will, or exploring.

00:37:01 ►

therefore I think people who have made

00:37:05 ►

major strides in their

00:37:07 ►

personal process

00:37:09 ►

before ever coming to that

00:37:12 ►

but it’s obvious

00:37:13 ►

you see that in

00:37:15 ►

traditional societies there is

00:37:17 ►

shamanism as an institution

00:37:19 ►

to lead people to these

00:37:21 ►

things, to promote

00:37:23 ►

a professional class of voyagers

00:37:26 ►

into the unconscious, into hyperspace,

00:37:30 ►

to steady the society.

00:37:33 ►

We have fallen so far from that

00:37:36 ►

that we’re in the position of having literally each one of us

00:37:39 ►

to reinvent the wheel.

00:37:41 ►

That’s why I think these kinds of gatherings are so radical, because we not only give each other

00:37:47 ►

permission to do what we’re doing, but we also can exchange techniques, lore,

00:37:54 ►

data,

00:37:56 ►

connections, and

00:37:59 ►

thereby solve everybody’s problem, whatever everybody’s problem is and facilitate going forward yeah

00:38:06 ►

i’d like to um maybe not right now but discuss cannabis and i for me it’s been like extremely

00:38:13 ►

uh i’ve just had incredible breakthroughs and understandings and just it’s been amazing just

00:38:18 ►

with very small amounts of grass you know and is it considered a site i mean it’s not a psychedelic actually is it well it’s in a funny class it’s a polyhydric alcohol it’s uh yes it’s funny that that uh

00:38:33 ►

grass is even though we teach these things and psychedelics always come up it’s sometimes hours

00:38:39 ►

can go by without talking about cannabis however hours cannot go by without talking about cannabis. However, ours cannot go by without

00:38:46 ►

smoking cannabis.

00:38:50 ►

Is it considered a psychedelic?

00:38:52 ►

Yeah, it is.

00:38:53 ►

I mean, it’s considered that it has a psychedelic

00:38:56 ►

effect. It’s definitely a psychedelic.

00:38:58 ►

I mean, ask anybody who’s

00:38:59 ►

eaten two or three grams of hash.

00:39:02 ►

Ask people who

00:39:04 ►

make cookies that cause people to need oxygen tanks.

00:39:10 ►

Yes, I should be the first person to praise the virtues of cannabis

00:39:16 ►

because I sometimes feel that I’m unfaithful to her by not talking more about it.

00:39:25 ►

I was what was known as a nervous child

00:39:30 ►

until I was about 18 years old.

00:39:34 ►

I stammered a lot, that now, now, now, now, now,

00:39:38 ►

that bit that you get in left-wing radical.

00:39:43 ►

And then I smoked some grass

00:39:46 ►

and I realized, my God,

00:39:48 ►

I can self-medicate myself into mental health.

00:39:54 ►

I can be like everybody else.

00:39:56 ►

And I have been ever since.

00:40:09 ►

And much of my motivation for going to the East was to be where there was plenty of hash.

00:40:11 ►

Hash seemed to be really the thing.

00:40:17 ►

And, you know, if you’ve ever looked into it

00:40:19 ►

and read the 19th century literature on hashish,

00:40:24 ►

it was clearly their LSD.

00:40:27 ►

In the first place, they didn’t smoke it.

00:40:29 ►

They ate jellied tinctures

00:40:34 ►

that they describe as being like emerald green jello.

00:40:38 ►

I mean, it must have just been unbelievable, this stuff, you know.

00:40:41 ►

And the Club de Hashashin would get together, Baudelaire and Durier and all these people,

00:40:48 ►

and eat this stuff, and their descriptions, you know, nobody could write those kind of descriptions

00:40:56 ►

unless they were just smashed out of their mind. I mean, it’s as good as 500 mics of LSD.

00:41:02 ►

I don’t advocate that you eat hash for one very simple reason, which I’ve never figured out a way around, which is it’s filthy. It’s filthy because it’s made by people’s hands and it’s hard to figure out a way you could go around that i suppose baking it in a cookie maybe that’s the raison d’etre

00:41:25 ►

of cookies besides that some people just don’t like to chow down on a couple of grams of black

00:41:31 ►

ash but uh uh the literature of the 19th century and astonishing people were associated with this

00:41:40 ►

for instance louisa may alcott uh there she wrote descriptions of little garden parties up the Hudson where these young Victorian women with doctor boyfriends would egg on their young paramours for new thrills, saying, you know, we’re tired of canasta and crocheting.

00:42:02 ►

Surely you have some little thing in your black bag.

00:42:06 ►

And this guy says, well, it just so happens, you know,

00:42:09 ►

I have these Lebanese bonbons.

00:42:14 ►

Four paragraphs later, you know,

00:42:17 ►

Louisa May Alcott, as you have never known her.

00:42:25 ►

I have a question.

00:42:26 ►

Yes.

00:42:27 ►

Being uninitiated

00:42:29 ►

to psychedelics,

00:42:32 ►

there’s a question of how

00:42:34 ►

accessible

00:42:35 ►

the weekend’s going to be.

00:42:38 ►

I mean, does one

00:42:39 ►

need to

00:42:41 ►

bring that background,

00:42:44 ►

that vocabulary, those images?

00:42:49 ►

Well, I think a healthy interest is probably sufficient.

00:42:56 ►

The psychedelic experience is always largely very personal.

00:43:03 ►

In fact, it’s amazing that we have made such bridges as we have to each other.

00:43:09 ►

So I think somebody for whom it’s all a mystery,

00:43:13 ►

being in this group and looking into this,

00:43:16 ►

would probably be a pretty good position to be in.

00:43:20 ►

You might not understand everything you hear,

00:43:26 ►

to be in. You might not understand everything you hear, but you will certainly get a sense of the style of the people who are doing this kind of thing.

00:43:33 ►

Well, I might as well represent my position. It’s an extreme position. So having said that, you know, you can just reject it.

00:43:53 ►

But the interposing of a teacher between ourselves and the mystery is, I think, in most cases in which it’s done, unnecessary and counterproductive.

00:43:59 ►

If anything, on the spectrum of spiritual options, what psychedelics stand for is the same kind of

00:44:09 ►

anarchy that democracy stands for in the spectrum of possible governments. In other words, it’s a

00:44:16 ►

do-it-yourself theory based on direct experience and use of tools rather than a lineage or a set of techniques that have been

00:44:28 ►

passed down for thousands of years. Once you have had a psychedelic experience, a strong and complete

00:44:35 ►

one, then you understand how Zen or just being in a beautiful place, or just having a conversation with a friend,

00:44:46 ►

how these things are psychedelic.

00:44:48 ►

But I don’t think you can really understand that until you have been given the benchmark

00:44:53 ►

on which to measure these things against.

00:44:57 ►

And the notion that there is a secret group of people, inevitably celibate men,

00:45:09 ►

secret group of people inevitably celibate men who are going to turn you on to the true skinny about reality is to my mind nothing more than the old shell game i mean the best advice i’ve ever

00:45:18 ►

heard to come out of the eastern tradition was that if you met the Buddha on the road, you should kill him. You know, finally a bit

00:45:26 ►

of candor out of all of this stuff. But I cheerfully represent a lunatic position, because

00:45:38 ►

so many people are saying, and it’s said with such fervor by such decent people that without the guru, without the attachment to the guru, you’re just lost, you know.

00:45:49 ►

And I’m sure that these are, it isn’t all a plot to enrich foreign immigrants.

00:45:59 ►

There’s a great deal of sincerity in it.

00:46:11 ►

a great deal of sincerity in it. But I’m just not sure that they’re talking about the same thing. The psychedelic experience is really in a category by itself. I was somewhat excited

00:46:21 ►

recently by these machines like the Synchro Energizer.

00:46:26 ►

I don’t know how many of you have had experience with these.

00:46:29 ►

Well, I just never had any use for machines.

00:46:34 ►

But these are interesting, not when you check into the universe of you

00:46:39 ►

and they put you on the canned program,

00:46:42 ►

but when you have your fingers on the dial

00:46:45 ►

and can smoke a joint and sit down with this thing

00:46:48 ►

and twiddle with it,

00:46:50 ►

it will go maybe half the distance.

00:46:54 ►

But the last half of the distance

00:46:57 ►

into the deep revelation has to come,

00:47:03 ►

it can’t come from a guru and it can’t come from a machine because it is not

00:47:08 ►

the property of human beings it is the gaia consciousness of the planet it is the real stuff

00:47:17 ►

the spiritual connection and the spiritual connection uh it can’t be faked or one should accept no substitutes.

00:47:30 ►

But I think psychedelic voyaging for that kind of insight is a fairly lonely task. serious about the core of the vision, not the community life of the ashram, not the loving

00:47:51 ►

presence of the guru, not the rush of turning other people onto your trip, but the real work

00:48:01 ►

when you turn your back on all that and it’s just you and the mystery.

00:48:07 ►

The other thing that you have to remember, and I probably have to remember it more than any of you,

00:48:13 ►

is that people really are very, very different.

00:48:19 ►

We treat ourselves as interchangeable units because our political point of view is largely democratic.

00:48:29 ►

So we tend to think of ourselves as just like everyone else.

00:48:34 ►

Well, for political purposes, that may have some utility.

00:48:37 ►

But when you actually look at people, for instance, some people are 50,000 times more sensitive to a certain odor than other

00:48:48 ►

people. They can smell that compound when it’s at a concentration, one 50,000th of what it takes

00:48:58 ►

for most people to respond to it. Well, similarly, I’m sure for for drugs and why keep it in the chemical realm similarly i’m sure

00:49:09 ►

for praise or love or respect some people need more some people need less

00:49:16 ►

so when you set out on the psychedelic path it isn’t that it’s almost as though the classical mystical injunction is

00:49:29 ►

reversed the first thing you have to do when you set out on the psychedelic path is to know yourself

00:49:36 ►

your limits your capacities what works for you people naturally are always wanting to discuss with me their experiences,

00:49:46 ►

and I can’t believe the things that people do that I wouldn’t dream of doing in terms of the

00:49:55 ►

size of doses or combinations. You know, people will say, well, we did a little ketamine when the MDMA got going, and then we smoked the DMT, and it was really far out.

00:50:10 ►

I’m sure that were I to try and follow you into it, I would just be gibbering.

00:50:16 ►

I’m sure that it was far out.

00:50:18 ►

I salute the turgor of your ontology to be able to survive such a thing.

00:50:26 ►

And yet, you know, it’s obviously working for them

00:50:28 ►

and they’re returning with insight.

00:50:32 ►

So really, there are no…

00:50:36 ►

This path is broad

00:50:38 ►

and you sort of have to make your own way through it

00:50:41 ►

and no one can tell you.

00:50:44 ►

That’s why it really comes out of

00:50:46 ►

these networking situations far more important than uh relating to a distant leader on the subject

00:50:56 ►

leary or metzner or me or anybody it would be much better to have a friend who was moving along the path with you

00:51:05 ►

You could talk to and then their friends and and sort of like that. It’s very personal

00:51:10 ►

It’s very real to me and I guess this is what makes me the fanatic is it is the only

00:51:18 ►

Thing that I’m sure is real. I

00:51:22 ►

Don’t want to be a complete

00:51:30 ►

pariah in the community, so I grant the possibility that yoga, fasting, diet, exercise, breath control, these things will move psyche around in various

00:51:38 ►

ways. But this truly transcendental, alien, information-filled space is, I think, pretty much strictly the product of psychedelic voyaging.

00:51:54 ►

And people say, well, you can do it on your own, follow this diet or this teacher.

00:51:59 ►

I wouldn’t care to do it on my own, thank you.

00:52:03 ►

I would be extremely unsettled

00:52:05 ►

if any of the things I’m talking to you about

00:52:08 ►

began to spontaneously happen

00:52:10 ►

because they are so far from ordinary reality

00:52:14 ►

that I’m quite content to keep them there in that category

00:52:21 ►

and to move between them.

00:52:23 ►

Shamanism, one way of thinking of it, in fact, in some languages,

00:52:27 ►

what the word means is go-between,

00:52:30 ►

both as someone who goes between two negotiating parties

00:52:37 ►

or someone who goes between two negotiating worlds.

00:52:50 ►

negotiating worlds it is uh what we want to be in this world is present caring aware filled with intuition uh and in touch with the dao the psychedelic thing is more like cutting-edge

00:52:59 ►

research in the philosophy department trying to really understand then how ordinary reality functions,

00:53:10 ►

but not trying to function in ordinary reality with that kind of a point of view.

00:53:17 ►

I think probably the great, the place where all these paradoxes come together very intensely is with DMT. DMT is, you know, very short-acting,

00:53:28 ►

two to five minutes, extremely intense, and there’s no way that you can talk about grafting

00:53:36 ►

that into ordinary life. I mean, the very idea is ludicrous. It is not a part of ordinary life.

00:53:48 ►

is ludicrous. It is not a part of ordinary life. It is something which breaks into ordinary life and maybe reorients the compass of ordinary existence, but not to be a part of it. Yes,

00:53:56 ►

when I live as I truly wish to live, I smoke grass about five hours a day,

00:54:03 ►

I smoke grass about five hours a day.

00:54:06 ►

And I just sit.

00:54:09 ►

And I bring books near me in order that should anyone happen upon me,

00:54:13 ►

I can claim to be doing something.

00:54:15 ►

But… I would. Eight, you’d be supplied for six hours without having to smoke.

00:54:30 ►

But do you think I would get the rush?

00:54:32 ►

No.

00:54:33 ►

You wouldn’t get that rush.

00:54:35 ►

No.

00:54:35 ►

Well, the rush is, there’s something to be said for that.

00:54:41 ►

Then you smoke a little bit.

00:54:43 ►

Yeah, well, that would work.

00:54:44 ►

That would do it

00:54:45 ►

well people it’s amazing i mean i have no practice i don’t even jog i mean my chiropractor is on me

00:54:57 ►

all the time and i have but i do manage to make an amazing amount of time uh for sitting stoned and and then i think all this

00:55:09 ►

stuff and one of the things that really pisses me off in the american scene is the way the media

00:55:15 ►

came at us it was with the people who use drugs are stupid this is is sort of like homosexuals have high-pitched voices kind of

00:55:27 ►

argument, you know, a complete travesty, a complete lie, and something that you’re hammered on

00:55:34 ►

every day. So we have Cheech and Chong and the fabulous furry freak brothers, and we who are

00:55:40 ►

heads enjoy this stuff and laugh at it. But i don’t think we realize how straight people think

00:55:48 ►

you know and even scientific reports say well if you smoke marijuana you can’t your memory is

00:55:54 ►

destroyed you have no motivation well i believe that i have an excellent memory and i also believe

00:56:02 ►

that i’ve smoked more weed probably than…

00:56:05 ►

I’ve smoked more weed than anybody in the house.

00:56:11 ►

And so I don’t know.

00:56:15 ►

It’s a slander.

00:56:16 ►

I mean, I sometimes worry about how much I smoke

00:56:20 ►

because now you’re supposed to worry

00:56:21 ►

about anything like that and re-examine it.

00:56:24 ►

And some of my dearest friends say, you could do it a little bit less.

00:56:32 ►

But I sort of hear it like clods of dirt falling on the coffin, you know.

00:56:39 ►

I really…

00:56:42 ►

So again, you always, in listening to me, you have to understand it’s lunacy that you’re

00:56:49 ►

hearing and you’re supposed to straighten your life out by taking a position about it not by

00:56:54 ►

believing it it’s uh sort of like that they say that people who smoke or take psychedelics escape from reality to me the main benefit of the

00:57:11 ►

psychedelics is that it it shows me that there are there’s a multiplicity of realities and that

00:57:17 ►

this is just one tiny very relatively unimportant segment of what’s really that’s absolutely true i lenny bruce in making a

00:57:28 ►

joke said reality is for people who can’t handle drugs that is absolutely true that’s absolutely

00:57:39 ►

true because uh you know there’s some it has to do with Darwinian constraints on the organism and so forth and so on,

00:57:51 ►

that what is important to the immediate prehension of being is survival stuff.

00:58:02 ►

So people allow that to become the defining edge of their reality and they live in

00:58:10 ►

that’s what mundane means mundane means close focus no awareness of the past no anticipation

00:58:18 ►

of the future no awareness of what’s going on to the margins of your own small set of concerns.

00:58:25 ►

And then people just shrink and shrink and shrink.

00:58:29 ►

The reason I continue smoking weed against a certain amount of advice not to

00:58:35 ►

is I’ve noticed what happens when I stop.

00:58:38 ►

When I stop, my worldview begins to shrink.

00:58:43 ►

Shrink, shrink, shrink.

00:58:44 ►

72 hours after the last joint, I’m going over my bank books and saying,

00:58:50 ►

demanding of Kat, what is our true financial situation?

00:59:10 ►

Well, I want to get into my prepared remarks,

00:59:13 ►

but I’ll tell you the story about,

00:59:17 ►

which is for me the final story on me and grass and why I do it and so forth and so on.

00:59:20 ►

When I was, shortly after I met Kat,

00:59:23 ►

in 1967 we met in occupied Jerusalem in the old city in what was a war zone.

00:59:31 ►

I mean, the Israeli-Arab war had just cooled.

00:59:34 ►

It was not five months in the past.

00:59:37 ►

Then I went on to Africa and to the Seychelles, which are a group of islands off the coast of East Africa.

00:59:45 ►

And I wanted to write a book there.

00:59:49 ►

And I had rented a house on almost a cartoon-like desert island.

00:59:56 ►

There were only 50 families on this island.

00:59:59 ►

They all spoke Creole, which I didn’t speak.

01:00:02 ►

It was a coconut island, and I had this wonderful little concrete

01:00:05 ►

house, and I had this amazing quarter pound of Mombasa black weed that I had scored from the

01:00:14 ►

Shushine Boys in Mombasa, and it was killer weed. So I got settled into this little desert island

01:00:23 ►

house, and I had my portable typewriter,

01:00:26 ►

and I had decided that I would keep a schedule of my writing, something I had never done.

01:00:31 ►

I would write from 8 o’clock in the morning until 2 in the afternoon every day.

01:00:35 ►

So then I looked at this grass there, and I decided that I would…

01:00:42 ►

I had just been in Jerusalem, where life had been lived in a cloud of hashish.

01:00:48 ►

I mean, we just were into it.

01:00:49 ►

So I thought, well, I’m pretty deep into this.

01:00:51 ►

I just turned 21.

01:00:53 ►

I wasn’t as sure of myself as I am now.

01:00:55 ►

So I thought, I won’t smoke any grass while I write this book.

01:01:00 ►

And I nailed the lid over the door of my kitchen and settled into this life of rising every morning,

01:01:10 ►

writing for hours,

01:01:11 ►

then in the afternoon I would take the dogs

01:01:13 ►

and walk or swim in the lagoons

01:01:16 ►

and a couple of months passed

01:01:19 ►

and as I moved through the writing of this book

01:01:22 ►

I began to promise the grass to myself

01:01:27 ►

as the prize for finishing this book

01:01:30 ►

and holding this schedule

01:01:31 ►

so finally the book was done

01:01:34 ►

and I decided that that evening I would get stoned

01:01:39 ►

so I went through my whole afternoon schedule

01:01:42 ►

anticipating it

01:01:43 ►

and that evening I cleared away the dishes and I rolled this enormous bomber,

01:01:50 ►

moved my chair outside under the palm trees and the ocean was lapping in.

01:01:56 ►

And I smoked two gigantic J’s of this stuff.

01:02:00 ►

And I was just sitting there just waiting because I knew since I hadn’t smoked so long that

01:02:05 ►

it was just going to be tremendous. And as I’m waiting for the real thing to hit, there begins

01:02:11 ►

to be this funny thing coming in on the side. And I try to look away from it and not notice it.

01:02:19 ►

And then my attention goes back to it. Well, finally, I couldn’t hold it back, and I just faced this state that was coming over me.

01:02:28 ►

And what it was, was it was the incontrovertible realization

01:02:35 ►

that what I had written was complete garbage.

01:02:43 ►

Just trash, you know, just sophomoric, megalomaniac, egomaniacal,

01:02:53 ►

ungrammatical, poorly conceived, misspelled, tasteless, crass, gratuitously pornographic and ill-conceived and i i was just like oh my god what have i done

01:03:10 ►

so then i i just began running around furiously smoking grass and trying to and and writing

01:03:18 ►

writing trying to save this thing and i got out my air tickets and my schedule and i saw

01:03:24 ►

you have three more weeks on this island before you have to go to India and back to San Francisco.

01:03:30 ►

And I just started living day and night, smoking dope, writing and drinking coffee as much as I can.

01:03:37 ►

Tried to save this thing.

01:03:40 ►

Never could save it.

01:03:41 ►

I mean, I will share with you its name to convince you that this was a book that should never have seen the light of day.

01:03:49 ►

It was called Crypto Rap, Meta-Electrical Speculations on Culture.

01:03:55 ►

Now, if that’s not a book which should not be published, I don’t know what is.

01:04:01 ►

So then I said, okay, take my word for it.

01:04:08 ►

No, this was…

01:04:10 ►

So then I just saw, you know, it’s not for you.

01:04:14 ►

Other people may find clarity and a rebirth of their feelings.

01:04:18 ►

And people say to me, they say, I felt so good after I quit.

01:04:23 ►

Good.

01:04:26 ►

Good luck.

01:04:27 ►

I appreciate your aesthetic example.

01:04:33 ►

Terrence, I’ve actually found that it’s very helpful when I’m writing

01:04:36 ►

that I try writing both straight and stoned.

01:04:38 ►

Like I go back and forth with the two.

01:04:40 ►

Like I write straight and then I revise a stone.

01:04:42 ►

Or I write a stone and then I revise a straight.

01:04:44 ►

One way or the other. and you go back and forth

01:04:46 ►

and you get alternative perspectives

01:04:47 ►

it’s almost like you become two different people

01:04:49 ►

so you can get like a second opinion

01:04:50 ►

I think that’s good

01:04:54 ►

and sometimes I’ve made the metaphor

01:04:56 ►

that these drugs are like

01:04:58 ►

points

01:04:59 ►

on a geometric grid

01:05:02 ►

that you can only

01:05:04 ►

describe a one dimensional that you can only describe a one-dimensional universe if the only dimension

01:05:09 ►

you know is reality. If you have reality and cannabis, then you get a two-dimensional universe.

01:05:17 ►

Reality, cannabis, and something else, three points that can be connected, and then suddenly

01:05:24 ►

you have a plain figure.

01:05:26 ►

And what you’re doing is you’re creating a map of consciousness that actually takes account

01:05:31 ►

of all the consciousness there is.

01:05:33 ►

And then you get, you know, I mean, when psychoanalysis began, it was basically awaken asleep was

01:05:42 ►

the theory of consciousness that Freud inherited. Awaken Asleep was the theory of consciousness that Freud inherited.

01:05:47 ►

Awaken Asleep, what’s the big deal?

01:05:51 ►

So then he showed that states of multiple personality and things like this

01:06:01 ►

were not only phenomena of locked wards that we all had this

01:06:06 ►

capacity, we all were to some degree

01:06:08 ►

schizophrenic, there were components

01:06:10 ►

in the psyche

01:06:12 ►

and then subsequent

01:06:14 ►

history of psychoanalysis and

01:06:16 ►

therapy has sort of teased that out

01:06:18 ►

The best

01:06:22 ►

vision of the future will win

01:06:24 ►

so says Terence McKenna.

01:06:26 ►

And if you’ve joined one of our live salons lately, you already know that my vision of the future is one in which artificial intelligence will take over a significant part of your life.

01:06:38 ►

And whether it’s good or not, I can’t say, but that’s the vision I think is going to win.

01:06:43 ►

So stay tuned.

01:06:43 ►

I can’t say, but that’s the vision I think is going to win.

01:06:44 ►

So stay tuned.

01:06:49 ►

And in keeping with my new minimalist approach to introducing these podcasts,

01:06:51 ►

for now at least,

01:06:54 ►

this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.

01:06:56 ►

Namaste, my friends.

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