Podcast 700 – Plants That Talk

Program Notes

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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

We return once again to the land of Terence McKenna’s workshops.

As you will hear, his question and answer format leads him into telling some of the old stories we heard early on in Terence’s talks but some of which were dropped later on. As far as I can remember, this is the only time he talked about taking psychedelic substances in his dreams.

Transcript

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Three-dimensional transforming musical linguistic objects.

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Helvetians.

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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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And today I’m going to continue with a Terrence McKenna workshop,

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and I’m going to give you a little assignment.

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For years now, well, a lot of us at least have been talking about the way Terrence approached these events.

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Basically, he would give a talk about something that was, well, vaguely in tune with whatever title had been given to the workshop.

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As you know, these gatherings were somewhat like our

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weekly live salons where the suggested topic is sometimes touched upon, but it seems like the

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conversation often drifts into its own channel rather quickly. Right now, we’re going to hear the

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beginning of one of these sessions where Terrence invites questions. And after about 30 minutes or so,

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I’d like you to pause the recording

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and give just a little thought to the length and depth of what was being discussed, all without

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prior preparation or notes. And you’ll better see for yourself what an amazing mind Terence

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McKenna had. And now, here’s Terrence. But now it’s your opportunity to get your agenda on the floor

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or get clarification on what it is that you wonder about,

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not only from me, but from each other.

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So some brave soul has to seize the initiative.

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There he is.

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I had a question about yesterday’s talk about hypnogia.

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Uh-huh.

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From there, okay, first there was phosphenes.

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Right.

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And then hypnogia.

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And then you went from hypnogia to vision.

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And I thought, where does the dream state come in?

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Because usually the…

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Well, I think we were talking about the visual field.

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The dream state is like a vision,

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except that it’s not emotionally charged

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in quite the same way that vision is.

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It’s almost a difference in emotional quality

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rather than the visual impression.

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I mean, do you agree?

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I think so.

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When I’m dreaming, though, I get more of the feeling of a very emotional time,

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but when I’m envisioned, it’s more like rapture, which I guess is high emotion.

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That’s what my analysis of it is, that it’s touching you at a deeper emotional level.

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But it’s interesting, this question you raise about dreams.

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We were talking last week.

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It’s fairly common among people who use psychedelics

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to have dreams in which the psychedelic actually appears as a motif,

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and then you take it, and then you have the experience in the dream.

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And I’ve even had this with DMT, which is, to my mind, the strongest psychedelic.

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So it’s very interesting because it’s almost, it’s a perfect case proving that really you can do it

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all yourself.

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In other words, that the chemical precondition is there in deep sleep.

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Yeah, Eric.

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Do you think memory is, more or less, instead of memory being something you remember,

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in the sense of replaying something,

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but it actually takes you back to the moment or something.

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You mean that it could be an extremely strong memory of a psychedelic state?

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That’s a possibility. It’s pretty interesting. I don’t know. I’ve had very puzzling experiences.

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Maybe some of you have as well around the theme of memory and

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psychedelics I remember once in the Amazon I had had a wonderful mushroom trip and I

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took it again the next night to try and re-reach the same place again and instead I

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had this very bizarre trip in which I recalled with perfect clarity

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the basement of my aunt’s house some 20 years before. And I saw myself playing alone in the basement

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on a certain sunny summer afternoon with a little circus set that I had. And as I played with this circus set,

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DMT stuff began leaking out of the air in front of me. And here I was, 20 years later,

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seeing this as though I were reliving a memory of a five-year-old child seeing the stuff that he couldn’t tell his parents about

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couldn’t tell anybody about

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so is that a hallucination

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is that a memory

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what is it

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it’s interesting in talking all the talk

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we’ve done about hallucinations

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to introduce the concept

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of a cognitive

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hallucination

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a cognitive hallucination is where you don’t see something that isn’t ordinarily there.

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You understand something that isn’t ordinarily there.

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An example of this is I had a friend in San Francisco who I had told him,

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you know, when you take the mushrooms, stay in your apartment in the dark, just be with them. I told him this maybe ten times. So he takes the mushrooms. An hour into it, he realizes in such a way that just causes him to laugh aloud that I had been kidding. But that wasn’t what I had meant at all.

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That what I had really meant was to do that

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because we were preparing a surprise birthday party for him

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at the bar down the street.

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So congratulating himself over the fact

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that he’s figured out this cleverness

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that we’ve launched upon him.

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He dresses himself and gets ready, goes down to this bar and bursts in the front door and says,

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I’m here.

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The story goes from there, but that’s the part about cognitive hallucinations.

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And, of course, sometimes a cognitive hallucination

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will stand up. Then it becomes a new truth

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and passes into the

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Nemours as a competing member.

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What else is on people’s minds here?

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Just…

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I’m real curious about the phenomena

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of the…

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When you’re on the mushrooms

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and you experience it’s like other entities

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other intelligence.

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And I’ve like tried dialoguing with this thing

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and like asking, are you a hallucination?

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Are you real? What are you?

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And it’s like, I just can’t tell.

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I just cannot tell whether it’s real or whether I’m

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hallucinating it or whether I’m creating it or whether it’s another part of me

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that’s separated from me or it’s a cluster of neurons

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that’s associated from the rest of my brain or something.

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It’s just like the most puzzling thing to me.

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Any insight you can get into that experience.

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Well, I think that’s the core puzzling experience

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when you meet the other organized as a speaking mind.

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And I’ve wondered these same things, asked it what it is.

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It seems to be able to present itself many different ways.

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I mean, it can be almost like a robotic, cybernetic, disembodied kind of thing, or sometimes it’s like,

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you know, your girlfriend in hyperspace. It has this very sexy

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kind of, I don’t know, these funny vibes to be coming off a

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pharmaceutical product.

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But it might as well be another intellect because it seems like it.

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It seems as different from you

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as the person sitting next to you,

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at least that different from you.

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So I treat it that way.

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I don’t know.

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Perhaps people have always heard voices in states of high agitation or stimulation.

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We don’t know what to do with that kind of thing because it’s not in our tradition.

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But it’s a shocking reality.

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I mean, for anybody who thinks plants don’t talk,

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it’s a real life reorienting experience

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to have one then harangue.

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And I didn’t think plants talked.

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I had friends who claimed this,

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and my dream was really to reach,

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to figure out what these people could possibly mean. Why do you actually to me because I don’t hear voices it’s more like images and feelings sensations well it has many modalities it can be a like with ayahuasca it seems to be truly a visual communicator its mode is vision it shows you what it intends. But the mushroom

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actually speaks. It delivers itself of little aphorisms. You know, I’m sure you’ve heard me

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try to sum them up for people. I mean, it’s said things to me like, man must have a plan. If you don’t have a plan,

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you’ll become part of somebody else’s plan. It’s said, nature loves courage. The way nature responds

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to courage is by removing obstacles. Well, these are things that your middle track Zen guru could probably come up with.

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But then it says other things which are completely puzzling.

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It says things like what you call man is time.

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And then sometimes it is humorous.

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I mean, hilariously, insanely humorous.

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It’s like having groucho Marx in bed with you.

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I mean, sometimes it has a certain Rod Steiger-esque kind of Jewish persona.

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I remember one conversation I had with it where I said,

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what are you doing here?

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And it said, listen, you’re a mushroom, you live cheap.

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And I said, can I go back to my audiences and report that this is what the extraterrestrial said?

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You’re a mushroom, you live cheap.

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I said, you know, the neighborhood wasn’t so bad until the monkeys moved in.

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I’ll tell a funny story about this thing, about the Jewish persona of the mushroom,

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because it’s a standard story of mine that I tell.

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And I was in a restaurant in Malibu with Bob Chartoff and Lou Carlino who some of you know

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a bunch of fancy

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Hollywood type people

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and there was this French

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producer there

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this woman and she and I had been

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seated together at dinner

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and she said you say

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that the mushroom speaks to you

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but I don’t understand how

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this can be what do you mean it speaks to you, but I don’t understand how this can be.

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What do you mean it speaks to you?

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And Ralph Abraham was there too, and I, in my sincere way, said,

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well, it’s like the part Steiger played in the pawnbroker. It just, and at that moment, Stiger stops by the table to shake hands with everybody there.

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And I’m like, true story, true story.

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And Ralph, who’s watched this whole thing go down, leans across the table to me and says,

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what this proves is the mushroom can reach

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into our world no matter where we

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are and shake the bars.

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Which isn’t a very good

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answer to your question. The answer is, I

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don’t know. It’s a puzzle. It’s

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very strange.

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It’s very, very

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mysterious. I guess I should try and describe this. You are the

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people to tell, if anybody is. What I found about this communicating with it thing is that

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sometimes it’s easy and it just comes and that’s what the trip is about. But if it’s a

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lucy for you or if you’ve taken mushrooms many times, and yet this doesn’t

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seem to be what happened to you, I couldn’t describe how it works for me anyway. It’s as though a certain

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level of intoxication with the mushroom is the precondition for being able to communicate, but is not

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itself enough

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so that I will feel the levels building in my body

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and I will be very stone and then I will come into this place

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where I will say, now it is possible to invoke the spirit in the mushroom.

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And then I invoke it.

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And it’s a pretty straightforward thing.

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I remember an old I Love Lucy thing

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where Ethel is asking Lucy

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how she gets in touch with the flying saucers.

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And she says, I just say,

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come in, little green men.

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Come in, little green men.

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It’s almost like that.

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In fact, it is like that.

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No, they’re not green.

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What I do is I get the feeling, which is, I call it,

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it’s almost like, I’m embarrassed to even tell this kind of stuff.

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It’s a feeling of being very Irish.

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It’s a feeling of elfanness.

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And then I say, aha, we’re getting close in.

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I smell them.

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They’re nearby.

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And then I just say, you know, show, show, show, show.

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And there’s this music, this tinkling stuff, and it begins to get stronger.

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It’s where I say, you know, come in, little green men, come in.

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And then it gets louder and louder.

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And then finally, once you get the valve open, you don’t have to worry, it will pour through

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as long as you can watch it and be with it and sing with it.

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And it is obviously the basis for the idea of elves and elfin energy and little people

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who make jeweled machines and play musical instruments and live in the mountains.

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But I think often when you’re really getting a strong voice,

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a strong audio component,

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you’re not seeing the visual fades somewhat when you’re hearing very clearly.

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And then when you’re seeing very clearly,

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it’s very seldom you’ll have music and stuff,

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but it’s very seldom that you’ll be getting an audio transmission,

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you know?

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It seems to me that the vision can go both ways.

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And I would like to say something about the surrender question.

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I think that’s really significant.

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It continues to be significant over all the years and all the trips to me.

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I think actually surrenders a question at every level,

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including not on psychedelics, at every dosage level.

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And it really is a letting go of whatever fear you have.

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Fear is resistance to whatever.

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All the things they can think of to be afraid of, like, everything, right?

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And surrender is a conscious letting go of that to then whatever is behind it.

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So it doesn’t take five grams flat in your back.

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You know, all you can do is make your lungs go up and down,

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and that’s the level.

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It can be anywhere along the way.

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Once and often, when you get to these intense doses,

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as you probably know, the fears of death, right?

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If it’s not death of ego, it’s death of body, it’s death of something.

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It’s the transformation that you haven’t yet mapped, and that makes it terrifying.

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And that’s the time to surrender, because it’s not lethal.

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It is just transformative.

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And then once you have done that,

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you can ask for whatever you want.

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You can ask for answers to your questions, voices, entities.

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You may not get exactly what you ask for.

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I was saying to someone this afternoon that sometimes I think what you get

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is a function of what I think of as the cosmic weather,

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what’s happening that day in the cosmos to an open channel like yourself,

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rather than what lesson you need to learn right now, or it’s a mixture of those.

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But you know how sometimes you have something really important going on,

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and you go in there and you really want to know about it,

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and you get this huge, profound thing that has nothing to do with what you asked about.

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And other times, it’s just direct response.

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Terrence, did you know how, in the very first instance,

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that you began to, you must have learned in some way

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how to invoke this, to say, come in, come in, come in,

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and it’s something you’ve stumbled into it some way.

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Can you recount that incident? Do you remember that?

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Sure. The way it happened to me was someone in 1967, just a few months after I’d begun

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taking LSD, somebody brought DMT to me and said, without any introduction, they just said,

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here’s something you might be interested in.

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It’s a drug.

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And I said, how long does it last?

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And they said, five minutes.

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I said, okay, thinking five minutes, what can it be, you know?

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And what happens with DMT is you leap over all the barriers in the first few seconds.

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Unlike mushrooms, where over hours and hours on a high dose,

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you might navigate yourself to the center of the mandala,

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DMT is like being struck by metaphysical lightning.

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I mean, the main question is, what the hell happened?

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Because it immediately took me to this place I had never suspected existed, you know?

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This dome-like, brilliantly lit space where these self-transforming machine,

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organic things were all around me and leaping through my body and singing and making objects and showing all this stuff to me.

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And it was like just all the veils were torn away in a single moment.

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And then that inspired me to look at the chemistry and then the botany and the shamanism,

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and to try and make my way back to that place

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at not quite such a super voltage.

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And that was the raison d’etra for going to the Amazon

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because those drugs in the Amazon,

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those plant combinations are working off the same chemicals.

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It was the reason for being into the mushrooms

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because the mushroom

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really experientially

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and chemically, it’s

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quite reasonable to call

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it a slow-release DMT

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trip.

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DMT is quite an astonishing

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thing. I don’t understand how they manage to

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keep it secret because

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it’s the convincer.

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It’s for the person who thinks these things only work if you’re soft-headed, because it’s the convincer, you know, it’s for the person

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who thinks these things only work if you’re

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soft-headed because it’s just

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it raises all the questions in a hurry.

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It’s so intense and so oriented

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toward the other and the visual

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and the hallucinogenic that it isn’t really like a drug.

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It’s more like an event that you ran into.

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You just came around a corner

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and there was the unspeakable.

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I don’t know if I would have ever…

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I was lucky in that sense.

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A lot of people take psychedelics a lot, I think,

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and never quite realized just what it is

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that they have their hands on

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because you need these

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ego-threatening, if not

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life-threatening, experiences

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somewhere along the way to hip you

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to just how intense

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this can be.

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There’s nothing any more intense

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this side of the grave

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than a strong psychedelic experience.

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Did you begin then to, once you’ve done the DMT,

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did you begin then to, as you would work with Civil Sivan or the Mushlins,

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and since it’s slower, you would begin to have some kind of recognition

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that you needed to invoke more and more,

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and you began to, did it take a ritual form, for example?

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Do you do the same thing each time

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what seemed most astonishing to me

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in these early DMT trips

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was that there was

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language that I hadn’t

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expected that what’s going on

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in the DMT trip besides the body

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transformations and the visual

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hallucinations and the little alien

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entities is they are

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speaking to you and you are understanding

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and yet they’re speaking in a language which is visible which is it’s pure magic it’s pure

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linguistic intent which you behold with your eyes and you feel like moses before the burning

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bush or something you say my god i didn’t know humans were wired for this kind of a thing.

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What is it?

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And then for many years I smoked DMT and contemplated it.

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And on DMT it comes very, very fast.

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It’s like spun gold and mercury, you know,

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and supremely intricate and supremely worked and rapid.

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And my dream was to be able to slow it down, to be able to do it, to be able to show it to people.

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And I read Robert Graves, the White Goddess, and had the notion in there, you know, he talks about a primary poetic language that he thinks existed

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before history that was so from the bone and the flesh of people that anyone could understand

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it.

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It wasn’t like Japanese and Iranian and American English.

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It was from the bones, not from the place.

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And poetry made in this language had the power not only to move people’s hearts and to open their souls,

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but to actually cause them to see realities pass before their eyes.

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And that these poets were using sound and language to do something that we have only the faintest, faintest memory of.

00:24:08 ►

And what the DMT being seemed to be saying was this art can be brought back.

00:24:14 ►

This visible language, this poetry made manifest is what you should learn to do.

00:24:21 ►

And all the trips were about, see what we’re doing? Do this. Do this.

00:24:25 ►

And eventually, I was able to do it on psilocybin. And then it was apparent to me that it’s gibberish.

00:24:38 ►

And that I had somehow missed the mark or that you have to be stoned

00:24:46 ►

or that there are parts still to be learned.

00:24:51 ►

I’d like to specifically address

00:24:54 ►

what I think your question was about invoking.

00:24:58 ►

I find that you can…

00:25:03 ►

There are many choices of how to do it,

00:25:05 ►

but you can consciously invoke an entity, a voice, an intelligence,

00:25:11 ►

that you can relate to.

00:25:12 ►

You can’t always get it to respond just as you intend,

00:25:16 ►

but the intention gives it a lot of stronger possibility of occurring.

00:25:23 ►

And the way I have come to do these things over the years,

00:25:30 ►

nearly always taking mushrooms by myself,

00:25:32 ►

although it’s very interesting to do it together,

00:25:35 ►

I really like to do it by myself.

00:25:37 ►

And it’s, you know, a lot of traditional touches like a candle for the focus of light in an otherwise darkened room.

00:25:48 ►

Breathing to let go of the thoughts and the busyness and all of that.

00:25:52 ►

Bringing a few of your most precious objects around you,

00:25:57 ►

things that have been handed down or whatever touches you, you know, objects of nature.

00:26:02 ►

A quiet place, the telephone’s turned off, the refrigerator is turned off, so you don’t feel

00:26:07 ►

like you’re, you know, wired to it during the entire thing.

00:26:11 ►

And a feeling of safety, you know, generate this whole environment.

00:26:16 ►

And I don’t do it with a guide, but I know a lot of people do, and that would be good for

00:26:20 ►

anyone who felt that they would feel safer with that and don’t mind the interaction

00:26:27 ►

that occurs unconsciously even with someone who’s there and not speaking.

00:26:31 ►

And then for me, I have found that it is an elusive thing to really get a clear message

00:26:43 ►

from a psychedelic and that you can ask for the voice or the sensation of the being.

00:26:54 ►

Sometimes it’s not as clear as a voice,

00:26:56 ►

but it’s a message coming through some kind of being anyway,

00:26:59 ►

to be an entity that you can relate to,

00:27:02 ►

that will not scare the socks off you,

00:27:04 ►

that will not be speaking in such an alien language that you can understand it, but one that you can relate to.

00:27:10 ►

If you have a particular resonance with the notion of the great goddess, which an increasing number of people do, of the original Gaia, you can ask for Gaia, and she’s right there, believe me, she’s right there.

00:27:21 ►

You know, if you really give her some beautiful words,

00:27:25 ►

it doesn’t have to be much, but really just ask, just say the channel’s open. It’s amazing how

00:27:30 ►

well it works. If you’d rather have it be your grandmother, ask for your grandmother. If you’d

00:27:35 ►

rather have it be, you know, any life form that has been meaningful to you in myth or your own

00:27:44 ►

personal history, try, experiment,

00:27:48 ►

try different things. You may find one you want to then go to repeatedly, but it’s a really good

00:27:53 ►

way to make it a two-way communication. Then you can begin to speak to that manifestation. It’s just like

00:28:04 ►

that person, that entity then becomes a metaphor for

00:28:06 ►

everything else, but it’s a metaphor that you can recognize that you can hear and that can hear you.

00:28:12 ►

And that’s what’s great about it.

00:28:14 ►

In real hallucinations, you had an entity or entities visit that you hadn’t called for.

00:28:22 ►

Oh, true hallucinations.

00:28:23 ►

And true hallucinations, I mean.

00:28:25 ►

Yes. That was not, yeah, not true hallucinations, I mean. Yes.

00:28:26 ►

That was not, yeah, not, you poked.

00:28:28 ►

Would you, could you tell us a little…

00:28:30 ►

Parents invoked them.

00:28:32 ►

Didn’t tell me.

00:28:33 ►

That’s really what happened.

00:28:34 ►

I’m not kidding.

00:28:35 ►

Yes, I was sitting here just like this.

00:28:38 ►

I was sitting here being still much younger and naive than I am now, I hope.

00:28:43 ►

And he was silently doing his, what I think of as cheeky thing that he does with the cosmos,

00:28:52 ►

which is, show me, what’s all this nonsense and all these years going by, and I want to know,

00:28:58 ►

and show me the object, and show me how it works inside, and give it to me then, because I’m going to go away in it,

00:29:02 ►

and, you know, just this whole demanding thing.

00:29:05 ►

And I was sitting there being feminine and receptive.

00:29:07 ►

There’ll be a ribba.

00:29:12 ►

So we were playing out our own archetypes, right?

00:29:14 ►

So I’m quietly.

00:29:16 ►

And I just became, it was in a house in Hawaii on a lava field.

00:29:20 ►

I mean, it wasn’t like it was an uncharged environment or something.

00:29:22 ►

It was on the world’s largest volcano in a lava field, in a stonehouse made out of lava

00:29:28 ►

that we’d been living in and experimenting in the most intense that we’ve ever experienced,

00:29:35 ►

at least once a week with the mushrooms.

00:29:38 ►

And apparently we pieced it together later.

00:29:40 ►

Terence was asking to be shown the cogs, you know, how it worked, the vessel,

00:29:46 ►

whatever.

00:29:47 ►

The object, the condensed object of hyperspace, yes, right?

00:29:54 ►

And then I began to feel very, very hot and extremely uncomfortable and slipping in and

00:30:01 ►

out of consciousness, and it wasn’t very far into the trip either,

00:30:05 ►

and finally said that and asked if he would like to go outside, or I said, I think I need to go outside, I guess.

00:30:12 ►

And it was all we could do to get across the room, you know, that state.

00:30:16 ►

And so we got across the room and off the door.

00:30:18 ►

And then, yes, there was this vessel that I could see right above me, erratiating me with this light,

00:30:26 ►

with these beings in it, and I could see everything above me, irradiating me with this light, with these beings in it,

00:30:28 ►

and I could see everything about how it worked.

00:30:33 ►

I could see all the, they weren’t gears, it was much more high-tech than that,

00:30:39 ►

but all the mathematical relationships of this entire hyper-dimensional object and of their bodies as well and of their intentions and of this light that was shining down.

00:30:44 ►

And I did feel like I was being vaporized

00:30:47 ►

and that my life was seriously in danger,

00:30:50 ►

even though I knew with part of my mind

00:30:53 ►

that this wasn’t a so-called real object, you know,

00:30:55 ►

and I melted to the ground in a puddle

00:30:57 ►

and I could feel my spirit rising out of my body

00:31:00 ►

into like a cloud that was expanding

00:31:02 ►

and it was almost out of reach.

00:31:04 ►

I mean, but I couldn’t do anything about it, couldn’t speak or anything.

00:31:08 ►

And Terence knew all this was going on too as he watched me disappear into the ground.

00:31:12 ►

She could not be roused to consciousness.

00:31:15 ►

She kept slipping into unconsciousness, which…

00:31:18 ►

And he finally, to make this story short, picked me up, realized there was no one to help

00:31:23 ►

where miles from anywhere and didn’t have a car and all of this stuff, and picked me up and took me to the back to the water tank and, picked me up, realized there was no one to help where miles from anywhere and didn’t have a car

00:31:25 ►

and all of this stuff,

00:31:26 ►

and picked me up and took me to the back

00:31:27 ►

to the water tank

00:31:28 ►

and doused me repeatedly

00:31:30 ►

with icy cold water,

00:31:32 ►

which brought me,

00:31:35 ►

which recondensed the vapor

00:31:36 ►

back into my body,

00:31:38 ►

although I felt, as long as I didn’t have

00:31:39 ►

icy water everywhere on me

00:31:41 ►

that it was escaping still, you know,

00:31:43 ►

but they kind of backed off.

00:31:45 ►

And then we spent all night holding them off.

00:31:48 ►

And, you know, it would begin to happen again,

00:31:52 ►

and this heat would rise, and things were sprouting out of everywhere.

00:31:55 ►

And it was just, it was madness.

00:31:57 ►

But it was beautiful through the whole thing.

00:32:00 ►

I was in a state where alarm wasn’t something that I could feel because I was

00:32:06 ►

beyond that, you know, but poor Terrence

00:32:08 ►

was pretty alarmed.

00:32:09 ►

When Terrence makes a response, why were you able to see this

00:32:12 ►

and Terence was not

00:32:14 ►

able to see it if he was the one

00:32:16 ►

to be invoked?

00:32:17 ►

Well, that’s

00:32:18 ►

a question for

00:32:20 ►

parapsychologists, I guess, you know?

00:32:23 ►

I mean, it was telepathy for sure, of which we’ve had many experiences.

00:32:28 ►

And I think it was because I am able to become very receptive in that state.

00:32:37 ►

And also there was probably a lesson in it for both of us,

00:32:44 ►

which we’ve been mulling over for years, you know,

00:32:47 ►

about how these things work, about being a couple,

00:32:52 ►

partly about being in and yang,

00:32:54 ►

and who asks for what and who gets what,

00:32:57 ►

and in what form do these things arrive,

00:32:59 ►

and how do you deal with them.

00:33:00 ►

We had not been together very long at that time.

00:33:02 ►

So it was the closest pass to death that we had for years, in fact,

00:33:09 ►

until we got into childbirth and a few other outrageous stories

00:33:13 ►

that aren’t appropriate right now.

00:33:16 ►

And that happened on mushrooms?

00:33:19 ►

Yeah.

00:33:20 ►

Now, when I said…

00:33:21 ►

You have a very large dose?

00:33:23 ►

No, but we’d been doing it a lot.

00:33:25 ►

It was always at least five grams,

00:33:27 ►

but also we were doing it.

00:33:28 ►

We slowed down after that.

00:33:30 ►

It was an extremely complex event,

00:33:35 ►

this thing which happened.

00:33:36 ►

I mean, what was happening,

00:33:39 ►

what Kat describes as my cheeky interview with the thing,

00:33:43 ►

was in the first pass of hallucinations,

00:33:47 ►

it had presented this notion, a favorite notion of it’s with me, of a nearby planet.

00:33:54 ►

It shows me this blue-green planet that is like a super Indonesia.

00:34:00 ►

It has an equator girdling set of islands that go completely around the planet and no continents at its poles.

00:34:09 ►

And the rap is always, you know, stick with me, baby, and we’ll deliver this.

00:34:15 ►

And so I’m looking at this planet.

00:34:18 ►

The mushroom says to me, stick with me, and this is where you’re going, right?

00:34:24 ►

And so then I just was, we’ve been taking it a lot, and this is where you’re going, right? And so then I just

00:34:25 ►

was, we’ve been taking it a lot

00:34:28 ►

and I said, you know, big

00:34:29 ►

talk.

00:34:34 ►

Always

00:34:35 ►

with you, it’s talk.

00:34:39 ►

You know,

00:34:40 ►

why don’t we just

00:34:42 ►

step outside here

00:34:44 ►

and you just bring it down

00:34:46 ►

so that we can understand, you know,

00:34:50 ►

how it is between you and me.

00:34:55 ►

And then it said, no, if I show you the ship,

00:34:59 ►

you’ll figure out how it works.

00:35:02 ►

And I said, I’m the grower.

00:35:06 ►

Without me,

00:35:08 ►

you’d still be standing on a cow paddy in the middle of the

00:35:10 ►

Amazon jungle.

00:35:13 ►

And it said,

00:35:14 ►

you know, so

00:35:16 ►

this is going back and forth.

00:35:17 ►

And about that time, Kat says,

00:35:19 ►

I’m feeling hot.

00:35:21 ►

So then we go outside, and I didn’t see

00:35:24 ►

anything, but she was clearly slipping into unconsciousness.

00:35:29 ►

And I didn’t say that the subjective information in it,

00:35:33 ►

which was very, which was central,

00:35:37 ►

and is central to my life, actually.

00:35:40 ►

It was like those wonderful models of molecules,

00:35:43 ►

there are many styles of those,

00:35:44 ►

but with the rods and the spheres,

00:35:47 ►

and the spheres were all colored jewels,

00:35:50 ►

and the rods were clear and sparkling,

00:35:52 ►

and every relationship was different in the ways they were connected.

00:35:57 ►

And everyone, all the meaning of everything,

00:35:59 ►

was in this ship, you see.

00:36:02 ►

And I was dazzled and kept looking, even with my eyes closed

00:36:06 ►

falling on the ground. I could see it all the time, and I kept looking. And the beings kept saying,

00:36:10 ►

don’t look, you can’t see this. You can’t know this. This isn’t for people to know. Stop looking.

00:36:15 ►

And I said, I can’t stop seeing it. I just see it with my eyes closed. Here I am. Please stop shining

00:36:20 ►

this ray on me. That was their defense, was heating me up. And so all this information was just pouring in second by second

00:36:28 ►

while I’m vaguely aware of Terrence out there panicking and all of the stuff.

00:36:32 ►

And I…

00:36:32 ►

You’re a calm man there.

00:36:34 ►

Calmly panicking, yes.

00:36:35 ►

And so I felt that over the many minutes that this experience took,

00:36:45 ►

I imbibed the formulas that tell how it all works.

00:36:53 ►

For a couple of years after this experience,

00:36:57 ►

I would periodically have dreams of being followed, being chased, living underground,

00:37:05 ►

having the diagram that I had seen in my pocket,

00:37:08 ►

and the mind police being after me because I knew it,

00:37:13 ►

Nova Heat, Nova Heat, that’s what was shining down, you know, from Burroughs.

00:37:17 ►

And that it was secret knowledge

00:37:21 ►

and that it was not for human beings.

00:37:24 ►

And then one amazing dream was I was living like a street person in Berkeley,

00:37:29 ►

which I had never quite done before I’d lived in Berkeley.

00:37:33 ►

But, you know, really like hiding in people’s gardens at night and doorways

00:37:38 ►

and that sort of thing, crummy and with this little crumbled map of how it’s all put together.

00:37:44 ►

And finally, all these police cars, and I’m in somebody’s Rose Garden,

00:37:47 ►

and all these police cars arrive from all sides,

00:37:50 ►

and they know I’ve got the map in my pocket, and I say,

00:37:53 ►

how do you know?

00:37:53 ►

I do you know it’s me, and they whip out this fantastic model of it

00:37:57 ►

that they sat on the top of their patrol car, and they say,

00:38:00 ►

you made this, didn’t you?

00:38:01 ►

And I go, oh, you’ve found it, oh, no, you know, I’m giving away. And I go, oh, you found it. Oh, no. I’m giving away.

00:38:05 ►

And I haven’t made the model yet, but it’s because I can’t quite piece all the things together.

00:38:12 ►

But I am an artist, and I am trying in my life to make the model of this thing that I understood.

00:38:18 ►

So while it was life-threatening, it was also imparting this great secret, you see.

00:38:25 ►

And that’s what he was asking for.

00:38:27 ►

We are making the model.

00:38:29 ►

Yes.

00:38:29 ►

This is what we’re doing here.

00:38:30 ►

Yes.

00:38:31 ►

No, in many ways we are, I agree.

00:38:33 ►

I would, just because I love visual material,

00:38:38 ►

I would like to make a three-dimensional visual model of it as well, you know.

00:38:42 ►

But that’s a trick.

00:38:44 ►

This is a very persistent theme

00:38:46 ►

in these deep psychedelic things, I think,

00:38:49 ►

is something is trying to be communicated

00:38:52 ►

that is not on the

00:38:55 ►

love one another level,

00:38:58 ►

but more like fold flap A to

00:39:01 ►

flap B, that kind of thing.

00:39:04 ►

There is concern to communicate the construction of something.

00:39:10 ►

And when I realized this and then looked back through mythology,

00:39:15 ►

it’s always been there.

00:39:17 ►

The Mandaians, who were a Gnostic cult of even the pre-Christian period,

00:39:24 ►

had the notion

00:39:26 ►

that when the Messiah

00:39:27 ►

for them came

00:39:29 ►

he would construct a machine

00:39:32 ►

of some sort. They’d

00:39:34 ►

call it this, that he would

00:39:35 ►

construct a machine and that

00:39:38 ►

the machine would then pump all

00:39:40 ►

the souls to the

00:39:41 ►

moon and then from there

00:39:43 ►

they would be taken care of in some way.

00:39:46 ►

But it was the missing link was a machine

00:39:48 ►

which the second Adam would come

00:39:52 ►

and build. Cat had this experience of the structure

00:39:56 ►

of the flying saucer. When we were in the Amazon

00:39:59 ►

in 71, it was all about

00:40:01 ►

how do you build a transdimensional vehicle with the help of elfin advice.

00:40:09 ►

And it was molecular.

00:40:10 ►

It was interiorized.

00:40:12 ►

It had something to do with sound.

00:40:14 ►

You sing it into existence, but it has something to do with DNA.

00:40:18 ►

It’s a technology that is fantasy for us, except that you can feel that this has always been

00:40:26 ►

the Pythagorean faith,

00:40:28 ►

that color, sound,

00:40:31 ►

angle of attack,

00:40:33 ►

all of these things

00:40:34 ►

could go together

00:40:35 ►

to produce a super technology

00:40:39 ►

and a vehicle.

00:40:41 ►

And in the deep psychedelic states,

00:40:43 ►

there always seems to be either the concern with

00:40:48 ►

building something, imparting information about a plan, or the other persistent motif that people

00:40:55 ►

have is that the world is going to end and that there will be intervention of some spectacular

00:41:03 ►

sort, the second coming, flying saucers, something like that.

00:41:07 ►

Now, why these motifs exist?

00:41:10 ►

I don’t know.

00:41:11 ►

I’ve talked at times about what I call the transcendental object

00:41:15 ►

at the end of time,

00:41:17 ►

and I think maybe what human history is

00:41:20 ►

is a kind of collective psychedelic trip

00:41:24 ►

where we’re closing in on the mystery

00:41:29 ►

at the center of the mandala,

00:41:31 ►

sort of the shamanic gift difficult to obtain.

00:41:36 ►

And what it is, of course,

00:41:37 ►

is it’s the human soul realized, realized.

00:41:44 ►

And I almost said realized as a technology,

00:41:47 ►

but the realizing of it in any form would realize it as a technology.

00:41:51 ►

So that really history is the siren song of the soul,

00:41:56 ►

the saucer song of the soul,

00:41:58 ►

the group mind coming into existence through our efforts

00:42:04 ►

over several thousand years, something first

00:42:07 ►

glimpsed in dreams and then glimpsed in, you know, higher mythologies, and then glimpsed in

00:42:15 ►

technological visions and in psychedelic states, and finally actually invoked into history in such a way that its reality is incontrovertible,

00:42:28 ►

then history ends.

00:42:29 ►

I don’t understand why anyone could be moved to say such crazy things,

00:42:34 ►

but it seems to be the content of the experience.

00:42:41 ►

Now, of course, if any of you are psychologists, you recognize this as a syndrome,

00:42:47 ►

uh, grandiose delusions,

00:42:50 ►

Messiah complex, uh, misplaced reference.

00:42:55 ►

It has different kinds of names.

00:42:57 ►

It means you think that you’re going to be present or a part of the most important thing

00:43:02 ►

that ever happened.

00:43:04 ►

It’s a serious form of mental illness,

00:43:07 ►

unless it’s true.

00:43:10 ►

And you don’t find out until it’s too late.

00:43:16 ►

Yes.

00:43:18 ►

My question is, you’re familiar with Jose Aglaes’ work?

00:43:21 ►

Sure.

00:43:22 ►

This model that you just talked about sort of fit into that at all?

00:43:27 ►

Well, he is another person

00:43:29 ►

who is having a huge amount of information

00:43:31 ►

come at him from another dimension.

00:43:35 ►

And there isn’t very close mapping

00:43:37 ►

between his vision

00:43:38 ►

and the kinds of information that we’ve gotten,

00:43:43 ►

but in surprising places we come together.

00:43:46 ►

For instance, I developed a theory about time

00:43:50 ►

that has to do with the I Ching,

00:43:53 ►

and it’s an absolute gift from the space people.

00:43:57 ►

I mean, I didn’t think it up.

00:43:59 ►

I wrote it down while they told me,

00:44:01 ►

and it has nothing to do with Jose Arguellas

00:44:05 ►

except that it has an end date,

00:44:08 ►

which is the 22nd of December 2012 AD,

00:44:13 ►

the same date that the Mayan calendar

00:44:16 ►

has chosen for its end date.

00:44:20 ►

Well, Jose also picked up that end date.

00:44:24 ►

What’s interesting to me about this is I chose

00:44:27 ►

the date without knowing that the Mayans had chosen it. Why did I, a single person working in the

00:44:36 ►

20th century, choose to end my visionary calendar on the same date that a whole civilization chose in Central America in 900 AD.

00:44:52 ►

And the answer seems to be the only thing I have in common with the ancient Maya is that we both took mushrooms.

00:45:00 ►

Well, so then, is the plan so specific that it actually is an intervention from an organized intelligence beyond our species?

00:45:13 ►

Is the planetary fate really plotted?

00:45:18 ►

Tune in next week.

00:45:20 ►

I mean, I don’t know.

00:45:23 ►

I’m rational enough to resist these kinds of ideas

00:45:27 ►

because I just am.

00:45:30 ►

But I am also present with them enough to wonder,

00:45:35 ►

why is all this weird stuff going on?

00:45:37 ►

Are we going to find out that we have been sharing the planet all the time

00:45:43 ►

with something wiser, older, deeper, and stranger

00:45:47 ►

than we ever could suppose,

00:45:49 ►

and that it communicates us through shedding hallucinogenic molecules

00:45:55 ►

into the natural environment.

00:45:58 ►

But one thing that occurred to me while Kat was talking about invoking

00:46:03 ►

and how it could be anything you wanted it to be

00:46:06 ►

and how it could meet you on a rationally apprehendable level,

00:46:12 ►

it highlights the difference in our personalities

00:46:15 ►

for me to then say what I’m about to say,

00:46:18 ►

which is the way I do it is I say to it,

00:46:22 ►

show me as much of what you really are as I can stand.

00:46:29 ►

You know, and then it begins to do it.

00:46:33 ►

And I say, oh, that’s enough.

00:46:35 ►

I get the picture.

00:46:36 ►

That’s just quite enough of that, thank you.

00:46:40 ►

They don’t usually stop there anyway.

00:46:42 ►

Sometimes they do.

00:46:43 ►

Otherwise, I would be like an HP Lovecraft short story character.

00:46:47 ►

I would be for the rest of my life.

00:46:52 ►

It’s a real question when you communicate with this thing.

00:46:55 ►

How much of it is engaged in the act of communication?

00:47:00 ►

Is it like a person where it turns its attention upon you?

00:47:04 ►

Or is it talking to 10,000 other beings at the same time

00:47:09 ►

and how does it really seems to me

00:47:12 ►

and I’ve said this about extraterrestrial communication

00:47:15 ►

and aliens and all this that the real task with the alien

00:47:19 ►

is squeezing both parties into a form that the other can recognize.

00:47:27 ►

You know, I mean, the aliens that we get from Hollywood are just like, they’re trivial.

00:47:33 ►

They walk around, they speak, they have machines, they have two sexes or three or four,

00:47:39 ►

but anyway, the concept.

00:47:41 ►

And yet real aliens, the real task will be to even recognize it, to realize that

00:47:47 ►

you’re in the presence of it.

00:47:49 ►

This will be its task, too, to realize that we are something that it can relate to, because

00:47:57 ►

there is a great mystery on this planet.

00:48:01 ►

We are only one side of the coin of that mystery.

00:48:05 ►

Our existence here should be the clue to us

00:48:10 ►

that something really weird is going on.

00:48:13 ►

I don’t think most planets are like this planet.

00:48:17 ►

I can stretch out to the idea that there are many planets with life,

00:48:22 ►

but I think the level of complexity, the presence of

00:48:26 ►

a historical civilization,

00:48:27 ►

which is just going to exist for a

00:48:29 ►

geological microsecond,

00:48:32 ►

we are very,

00:48:34 ►

very close to the people

00:48:35 ►

we came out of 50,000

00:48:38 ►

years ago.

00:48:40 ►

And yet look at how

00:48:41 ►

we have changed the world.

00:48:44 ►

Who is whispering to us in our dreams?

00:48:48 ►

Whose hand is it that we feel guiding our destiny into the future?

00:48:54 ►

We’re so accustomed to being rational and reductionist.

00:48:59 ►

There ain’t nothing really going on here at all, school of thought,

00:49:04 ►

that we just deadened to the mysteriousness of our own presence.

00:49:09 ►

If we’re here, who knows what else could be here

00:49:13 ►

in the mountains, jungles, and deserts of this planet.

00:49:17 ►

I mean, we have not yet even carried out a complete cataloguing of nature.

00:49:23 ►

We don’t really know what kind of a foundation we’re standing on.

00:49:29 ►

And then when you take the psychedelics, which come out of the natural world, the message that they are bearing in the broadest sweep is that our historically created symbolic model of reality is almost worthless.

00:49:49 ►

I mean, it’s okay for dealing bread and trading donkeys, but once you get into anything deeper

00:49:58 ►

than that, it’s just a story we tell ourselves, a magic charm that we rattle against the darkness.

00:50:07 ►

The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us, except when we put our mind into the socket of nature,

00:50:19 ►

and then we connect up to something so bizarre that we can barely recognize it.

00:50:25 ►

Something lying so far outside our previous symbolic structures,

00:50:31 ►

that we don’t know whether it’s an alien invasion,

00:50:34 ►

the eminence of Christ’s immediate return,

00:50:38 ►

the rise of Atlantis, or just what it is.

00:50:42 ►

It is confounding.

00:50:44 ►

That’s the main thing about psychedelics.

00:50:46 ►

That’s why it seems to me it divides people.

00:50:50 ►

It’s for people who like the bizarre, the weird, the unthinkable, the unspeakable, the peculiar,

00:50:58 ►

the edge of meaning, beauty at its most baroque and almost, you know, the world of Hieronymus Bosch and Peter Broigel the elder.

00:51:10 ►

And some people don’t like that.

00:51:13 ►

They like to be reassured.

00:51:15 ►

They like closure.

00:51:16 ►

They love being ensconced in concentric circles of expectation and tradition and solidity,

00:51:28 ►

that sort of thing.

00:51:30 ►

And they, I think, this just gives them the hebi-jeebies, this kind of stuff.

00:51:36 ►

Because we’re saying that the intellectual world has an edge, you know,

00:51:41 ►

and that if you go over that edge, you will find the unanticipated

00:51:48 ►

tremendous.

00:51:50 ►

Well, it’s the mystery without any one person, any priest, or any dogma between you and it,

00:51:56 ►

which acts as a buffer so that you don’t really get it, you know.

00:52:01 ►

So when you take away any intermediary belief system, person who claims

00:52:08 ►

is closer or she’s closer to it than you are and she’ll tell you about it, you know, then you

00:52:13 ►

get it full on. You know, but a question that came up last night that I think, I don’t know

00:52:20 ►

the answer to it all, but I think it’s a good one to keep talking about, is you use the word alien

00:52:28 ►

whenever you talk about the mushroom, and yet it is an organism, and it is part of this whole

00:52:33 ►

spinning web of organisms we call Gaia. Each of these psychoactive plants is as well. Some of them

00:52:41 ►

seem more earthbound, and some are more space oriented or other world oriented.

00:52:47 ►

But each has its own clear tone and kind of order of message territory, sort of, you know, dimension maybe,

00:52:56 ►

that it presents. So you don’t, you can tell the difference most of the time,

00:53:02 ►

no matter how far out you are in the middle of a trip,

00:53:06 ►

you can tell whether you’re on ayahuasca or whether you’re on mushrooms or whether you’re on peyote.

00:53:12 ►

These things have qualities which are inherent in them, and yet they’re organisms.

00:53:17 ►

So then the question, now, is it just my mind or is it this thing that I’ve eaten,

00:53:22 ►

it begins to look like it can’t just be your mind

00:53:25 ►

because it varies according to the thing you’ve eaten.

00:53:27 ►

I think you were talking about that last night.

00:53:30 ►

And how, just in terms of an evolutionary question

00:53:36 ►

or a question about creation,

00:53:38 ►

how a different perspective, a different set of answers,

00:53:43 ►

a different kind of beauty, a different perspective, a different set of answers, a different kind of beauty, a different voice,

00:53:47 ►

got into each of these plants is something to ponder.

00:53:51 ►

Wonderful thing to ponder.

00:53:52 ►

If anybody knows the answer, please say it.

00:53:55 ►

I once asked, now I can’t remember which one,

00:53:58 ►

I think it was ayahuasca,

00:53:59 ►

how can there be a plant teacher?

00:54:03 ►

We’ve become accustomed to using this phrase, plant teacher, that’s what these are.

00:54:08 ►

And it assumes that we know what we’re talking about, just using those words together.

00:54:12 ►

You know, it’s like, I remember way back when I first smoked marijuana, someone said,

00:54:16 ►

do you want banana bread?

00:54:18 ►

And I went banana bread?

00:54:19 ►

How do these words get together?

00:54:20 ►

You know, and just, you know, that kind of silliness, right?

00:54:23 ►

Where meaning when you take it apart, it’s really hard to get it back together. Well, plant teacher is something that makes

00:54:29 ►

sense and then you begin to analyze it. Well, the plant told me that I had eaten that night told me,

00:54:34 ►

well, a plant teacher is a teacher who has chosen to take the form of a plant. So then you wonder,

00:54:42 ►

well, are there teachers just floating around out here?

00:54:46 ►

Some of them don’t have any form at all.

00:54:48 ►

Some take the form of a plant.

00:54:49 ►

Some take the form of a person or a cat or a place.

00:54:54 ►

Embed itself in the granite of a place.

00:54:59 ►

And then you go and you meet that teacher.

00:55:01 ►

I mean, we have these sensations, right?

00:55:02 ►

Other people have these experiences. You have to nod or I’ll feel like I’m just crazy. Yes, right? So I like entertaining

00:55:13 ►

the question, the ontological question, you know, how does a teacher get into a plant or what is it?

00:55:20 ►

It changes the question. The way you frame the question sets up the answers in a certain way.

00:55:27 ►

So you have to be careful how you frame the question.

00:55:29 ►

Maybe then it doesn’t matter if cats are teachers,

00:55:33 ►

and people are teachers too, how it got there.

00:55:37 ►

That’s great questions, but I see it more as a way into a doorway somewhere that’s real, and that’s the point.

00:55:47 ►

Well, maybe there’s a planetary regulating system,

00:55:52 ►

and people are simply cells in a larger organism,

00:55:59 ►

and when it comes time for something to happen,

00:56:03 ►

which maybe means all life leaves the planet or something,

00:56:07 ►

then the equivalent of hormones are produced in the environment to initiate this morphogenic

00:56:16 ►

re-scripting of what is going on. And suddenly animals which were perfectly happy hunting on the velds of Africa

00:56:28 ►

begin making art, watching the stars, and moving into history for the purpose of saving the planet.

00:56:38 ►

I really like to think that we are biologically regulated and that history is a biological phenomenon

00:56:47 ►

under the control of the environment.

00:56:50 ►

It isn’t something that is going against the environment.

00:56:54 ►

Now, the objection to that is that it looks so bad.

00:56:59 ►

Yeah, it looks cancerous.

00:57:01 ►

But the obvious counter to that is birth.

00:57:07 ►

I mean, birth is, there’s a lot of bloodshed.

00:57:12 ►

People make sounds as though they were in great pain.

00:57:15 ►

They are in great pain.

00:57:17 ►

It has all the attributes that we associate with the violent termination of the organism

00:57:26 ►

and yet

00:57:27 ►

it is the precise opposite

00:57:29 ►

it is the birthing

00:57:32 ►

of the new generation

00:57:34 ►

and it is unavoidable

00:57:36 ►

and it is perfectly

00:57:38 ►

natural

00:57:40 ►

well as a woman

00:57:43 ►

grows pregnant and she loses her silt-like form

00:57:50 ►

and becomes heavier and clumb, all these things,

00:57:54 ►

the changes which go on in pregnancy may be something like what has happened to the earth

00:57:59 ►

over the last 20,000 years.

00:58:01 ►

The earth is pregnant with humanity and perhaps much else. And obviously, you just

00:58:09 ►

look at the earth and humanity, say, these two can’t stay together much longer. They’re becoming a

00:58:16 ►

problem. The mother can’t function. The child is in danger. And like the birth situation,

00:58:28 ►

is in danger and like the birth situation where if the child is not eventually birth toxemia will set in then everything goes haywire then both parties are in

00:58:35 ►

danger and there has to be emergency intervention and so forth I don’t really

00:58:40 ►

think we’ve reached that point but I think we have come to term. And as you know, concerning birth, transition is the psychedelic compression of it all,

00:58:54 ►

where it all comes together.

00:58:56 ►

And it seems like it is impossible and overwhelming and is going on forever.

00:59:02 ►

And then it ends.

00:59:03 ►

And then the baby is born, and everything is seen to be all right.

00:59:09 ►

Well, I think the 20th century, it’s not a metaphor that we are birthing, the new soul of humanity.

00:59:16 ►

It’s actually happening, and it’s ripping our society and our planet to pieces.

00:59:21 ►

But what will come out of it is, you know,

00:59:26 ►

the meaning of our destiny,

00:59:28 ►

perhaps the meaning of the planetary destiny.

00:59:31 ►

And I hope that we’re going to be privileged

00:59:34 ►

to be midwives of this process,

00:59:38 ►

to be there on that great day

00:59:42 ►

when it all makes sense.

00:59:45 ►

And then you can turn and look back at the process,

00:59:48 ►

the wars and revolutions and pogroms and migrations

00:59:53 ►

and the whole thing is saying,

00:59:55 ►

now I understand what all that was about.

01:00:00 ►

That’s, I think, the real promise of getting with nature

01:00:04 ►

through the psychedelics,

01:00:06 ►

being in on that process.

01:00:08 ►

Because if you’re in on that process, anxiety will leave you.

01:00:12 ►

You will not define yourself as a victim.

01:00:15 ►

You will define yourself as a privileged spectator.

01:00:19 ►

Clive.

01:00:21 ►

A while ago about the tone of different substances.

01:00:25 ►

Have you ever entertained the idea that none of this is coming from outside of all,

01:00:33 ►

that all the various substances are doing is perhaps chemically accessing a key to this

01:00:42 ►

hell of a computer that we’ve got and given you access to knowledge that there all the time

01:00:48 ►

that without that key you didn’t get a chance to see it and so the teacher is really in your own head and the trick is finding the combination to unlock this knowledge and access it and understand it when you do reach it.

01:01:07 ►

Have you thought about this outside and inside dichotomy?

01:01:13 ►

Yes, well, yes.

01:01:14 ►

I think that it’s really that there is an outside and inside chemical thing going on

01:01:23 ►

because even with the food we choose to eat,

01:01:25 ►

we know how radically different the effects of everything is from, you know, whether we eat raw lettuce or raw cabbage,

01:01:35 ►

we have a different reaction, whether it’s coffee or tea, you know, that they get stronger or subtler,

01:01:41 ►

depending on what we choose. But I, as a person who loves plants,

01:01:46 ►

I give the plants a lot of integrity, each one of them, for their effects.

01:01:52 ►

Clearly, what happens when you take a plant psychedelic,

01:01:56 ►

or any psychedelic, is that its chemistry is meeting your chemistry

01:02:02 ►

and generating then this effect which wouldn’t happen

01:02:07 ►

if you hadn’t put the bonded its chemicals to yours in your brain in wherever first and

01:02:16 ►

ultimately in your brain but then that doesn’t really say that the information came with the

01:02:23 ►

chemicals or even that the information came directly from the synergy of, you know,

01:02:31 ►

the psilocybin molecule and the serotonin or the synapse and all of that stuff.

01:02:39 ►

So, yes, I do consider that it’s possible that the information is just information at large and different chemical combinations provide different windows

01:02:52 ►

through which to look at it,

01:02:53 ►

which is what creates this feeling of tone or personality

01:02:57 ►

to go with each chemical combination.

01:02:59 ►

Do you see what I mean?

01:03:02 ►

I’m thinking more thinking of the mind of a child

01:03:06 ►

for example of how

01:03:07 ►

we obviously get conditioned out of that

01:03:10 ►

and conditioned into certain ways of thinking

01:03:13 ►

and belief systems

01:03:16 ►

and on and on.

01:03:17 ►

And what the psychedelic does is

01:03:19 ►

tend to splatter that all over

01:03:22 ►

the wall and suddenly give you

01:03:23 ►

back into insights that you’re now willing to look at that all over the wall and suddenly give you back into insights

01:03:25 ►

that you’re now willing to look at,

01:03:29 ►

that you couldn’t look at before the substance got rid of all the garbage

01:03:35 ►

and allowed you to sort of start to look and investigate a little more closely.

01:03:41 ►

Well, I think if you’re talking about generic psychedelics,

01:03:44 ►

this is definitely true.

01:03:46 ►

What puzzles me, what makes the question interesting to me is, why do you get a different kind

01:03:51 ►

of information from each chemical combination? You see, that attributes something to the identity

01:03:58 ►

of the plant itself, it seems to me.

01:04:01 ►

Well, it could be that there are essentially different access codes.

01:04:04 ►

You’re tapping into different, you know, category,

01:04:06 ►

the channels of information.

01:04:08 ►

You can take that perspective on those also.

01:04:10 ►

Yes, and if you use a computer as a model,

01:04:12 ►

which is a good one, you know,

01:04:14 ►

and equally as mysterious to me, then…

01:04:18 ►

But I wonder, Clive, I mean,

01:04:19 ►

thinking about the question,

01:04:21 ►

is it inside or outside,

01:04:24 ►

it seems to me more is that what you have is a loosely coupled hierarchy,

01:04:30 ►

where there are elements of freedom and self-will at every level of the hierarchy,

01:04:39 ►

but always constrained by deterministic factors

01:04:47 ►

that are also at every level.

01:04:50 ►

So sort of the new model,

01:04:52 ►

which I think is coming,

01:04:54 ►

is that

01:04:55 ►

the earth is an organism,

01:04:58 ►

yes, that’s well established,

01:05:01 ►

but human history is a part of that organism.

01:05:06 ►

It is, and it’s as different from the rest of it as the brain is from the liver, but that human

01:05:13 ►

history is not somehow against the planet or unexpected or unwelcome, that it’s actually

01:05:21 ►

part of the control system, and yet it is controlled.

01:05:28 ►

And this is where I think we need to revision what drugs are.

01:05:33 ►

All of human history is the sculpting of human populations

01:05:39 ►

by their relationships to plants.

01:05:42 ►

I mean, think of the effect that sugar

01:05:46 ►

had on the rise

01:05:48 ►

of mercantilism,

01:05:49 ►

an empire building,

01:05:52 ►

or opium policy in the

01:05:53 ►

Far East, or the spread

01:05:55 ►

of rye, the replacing

01:05:58 ►

of wheat by rye

01:05:59 ►

in the Middle East

01:06:01 ►

as you move north and how that

01:06:03 ►

made certain kinds of populations and migrations possible,

01:06:08 ►

you could write a book about human history

01:06:10 ►

in which you analyze the entire phenomenon

01:06:14 ►

as movements toward equilibrium

01:06:19 ►

in response to states of disequilibrium introduced by plants,

01:06:26 ►

by foods, by spices, by drugs, by psychedelics, by addicting drugs.

01:06:32 ►

So that’s how in our own bodies a given system is regulated

01:06:39 ►

through the release of hormones,

01:06:42 ►

which turn on certain genes

01:06:45 ►

and turn off certain other genes

01:06:48 ►

and turn on certain secretions and turn off others.

01:06:52 ►

So I think we assume that human history

01:06:57 ►

has just been something dreamed up

01:07:02 ►

by egonautal males, mostly,

01:07:06 ►

each one building on the accomplishments of the other.

01:07:09 ►

But it may be that it’s actually always been regulated as a process

01:07:15 ►

by the planetary control system by regulating diet,

01:07:23 ►

that the diet of every species, and this, particularly this one,

01:07:27 ►

determines its energy levels, its intellectual preoccupations, its migratory patterns, its distribution

01:07:34 ►

of work and labor, and this sort of thing, which maybe this is over-answering your question,

01:07:41 ►

but it’s not a dualism.

01:07:46 ►

It’s not one or the other.

01:07:51 ►

Whether you see the control and the information from the drug coming from within you or without you

01:07:54 ►

is really a matter of perspective where you choose to describe it from.

01:08:01 ►

Intrinsically, it doesn’t seem to be possible to know that.

01:08:07 ►

We are like cells moving at the will of a larger system. Somebody once said electrons blindly run, and Alfred North

01:08:18 ►

Whitehead said, yes, but inside the body, they blindly run according to the body’s plan

01:08:25 ►

and I think that’s what you might say about people people blindly run

01:08:31 ►

but without realizing it they run according to Gaia’s plan

01:08:36 ►

would you tell about how perhaps a shaman in the Amazonian jungle would be using this

01:08:43 ►

and what his experience would be with,

01:08:45 ►

what aliens would he see and use and know?

01:08:48 ►

Well, the only really close relationship I’ve had

01:08:53 ►

with a shaman in the Amazon

01:08:55 ►

was with Don Fidel Mosambite in 1976

01:09:00 ►

and we spent a couple of months living

01:09:03 ►

very near him in the house where they had ayahuasca sessions once a week.

01:09:10 ►

And we would do these group sessions Saturday night,

01:09:13 ►

what we thought of as their Saturday night religious bash, you know,

01:09:17 ►

where they would all come in and have a great ritualized party in the search provisions.

01:09:22 ►

They were very good at it.

01:09:23 ►

They had been doing it a long time.

01:09:25 ►

They had the ground rules clear.

01:09:27 ►

It was really nice to see it,

01:09:30 ►

working that way, and to realize it was being repeated

01:09:32 ►

all over this vast jungle basin,

01:09:37 ►

this huge psychedelic society,

01:09:40 ►

functioning in equilibrium,

01:09:42 ►

except for our unfortunate intervention into it, where we disrupted everywhere we go by, you know, coming and taking their trees or encouraging them to grow a thousand times more coca bushes than they normally would or whatever, you know.

01:09:56 ►

But he, in group sessions, it was his practice, I believe, before we got there,

01:10:05 ►

to have a midweek session by himself

01:10:10 ►

to investigate the edges of the territory

01:10:12 ►

and keep on his own learning.

01:10:16 ►

And then the Saturday night was,

01:10:18 ►

he led a group.

01:10:23 ►

I believe on his own sessions from

01:10:26 ►

he wasn’t voluble

01:10:29 ►

but he would tell us some things

01:10:30 ►

from what he said

01:10:31 ►

he would encounter aliens sometimes

01:10:33 ►

he wasn’t frightened of them

01:10:36 ►

but he wasn’t particularly seeking them either

01:10:37 ►

there were some other plant combinations

01:10:41 ►

that he said brought out the weird things more

01:10:43 ►

and in fact one time we asked about something we’d read about all the stuff in off-prints from

01:10:49 ►

anthropologists and stuff.

01:10:51 ►

We asked about some plant, and he said, you know, visions for dogs, those visions aren’t for Christians

01:10:58 ►

for dogs.

01:10:59 ►

Of course, these people are only nominally Christian because they invoke all the ink and gods

01:11:03 ►

and everything when they start their trips, you know, but they throw in a few Rosicrucian

01:11:09 ►

references and all kinds of stuff to whatever they’ve ever heard of.

01:11:16 ►

They travel in their visions.

01:11:21 ►

He described, and other people who just came regularly to the sessions would describe,

01:11:27 ►

most of these people had never been anywhere.

01:11:30 ►

They would describe flying over the Andes to the great cities, to Lima,

01:11:34 ►

over to the mountain towns where their children or grandchildren had moved and grown up.

01:11:39 ►

And that’s how they would visit what they’d never seen before.

01:11:42 ►

This one tiny old man who drank through the week

01:11:46 ►

and had become quite useless

01:11:48 ►

and then would be totally remorseful.

01:11:51 ►

And it was so strange and wonderful.

01:11:56 ►

And, you know, give it all up Friday

01:11:59 ►

and Saturday night, take ayahuasca

01:12:02 ►

and see the virgin with snakes and leopards and, you know, all of these things,

01:12:07 ►

and then vow he’d never do it again and then by Sunday night be back drinking again.

01:12:12 ►

But he’d do this every week, so he lived this heaven and hell cycle constantly, you know, it was just amazing.

01:12:18 ►

But he would talk about, he’d never been out of this place at all.

01:12:21 ►

He said, I flew high up over the mountains.

01:12:24 ►

I flew all the way to

01:12:25 ►

this great city, which I believe was Lima, and they had sidewalks, which moved and were made

01:12:33 ►

of metal. There was a place where they were moving, and the people would just stand. Well, he didn’t

01:12:37 ►

know it sidewalks where he said, you know, places where people would stand and the ground would move

01:12:41 ►

them in rows along. Well, these were…

01:12:44 ►

It was the airport.

01:12:45 ►

Yes, the…

01:12:46 ►

And escalators and stuff.

01:12:48 ►

He was fascinated with that notion.

01:12:50 ►

So they had many things they would describe that they’d never seen,

01:12:54 ►

except that they’d seen them in their visions,

01:12:56 ►

and they would describe their children, their grandchildren.

01:12:57 ►

They would take a vision, have a vision, take a session, have a vision,

01:13:01 ►

see their grandchildren, and then write to their grown child describing the visit they just had with the grandchildren, you know. So it’s a real built-in part of their

01:13:09 ►

life. Would you say that they were traveling in their astral bodies? Do you feel that they

01:13:17 ►

had out-of-the-body experiences, or was it just the mental traveling? I think it would qualify

01:13:25 ►

as out of the body experiences,

01:13:27 ►

although they don’t in these group sessions

01:13:29 ►

just lie down in apparent unconsciousness.

01:13:33 ►

It’s not that kind of left my body completely.

01:13:36 ►

They manage to sit like we are.

01:13:39 ►

They go into a room as much darkness as possible,

01:13:43 ►

and they had one little house

01:13:45 ►

that was

01:13:45 ►

kept for

01:13:46 ►

this purpose

01:13:46 ►

it’s

01:13:47 ►

where we

01:13:47 ►

stayed

01:13:48 ►

the whole

01:13:48 ►

time

01:13:48 ►

we were

01:13:48 ►

there

01:13:48 ►

and

01:13:49 ►

sit

01:13:50 ►

against

01:13:51 ►

the walls

01:13:51 ►

there

01:13:52 ►

maybe

01:13:53 ►

a third

01:13:53 ►

of the

01:13:53 ►

people

01:13:54 ►

come

01:13:54 ►

as old

01:13:56 ►

trippers

01:13:57 ►

they come

01:13:57 ►

because

01:13:58 ►

they love

01:13:58 ►

the songs

01:13:59 ►

that come

01:14:00 ►

out of

01:14:00 ►

it,

01:14:00 ►

the visions

01:14:01 ►

because

01:14:02 ►

they’ve been

01:14:03 ►

taking

01:14:03 ►

ayahuasca

01:14:03 ►

for years

01:14:04 ►

and they’re very tuned in to this space,

01:14:07 ►

and they’re just old trippers, you know,

01:14:09 ►

and they come, and they compare other times,

01:14:11 ►

and they tell stories, and they share their wonderful songs.

01:14:14 ►

Maybe a third of the people who come are in need of healing,

01:14:17 ►

psychological or physical,

01:14:19 ►

and they come asking the shaman for that.

01:14:21 ►

Some of them will take ayahuasca, and some won’t.

01:14:23 ►

Some will just ask that the shaman, who has always taken it, will heal them in the state, but they all seem to get

01:14:29 ►

into this state, you know, and it has very much to do with sound. They sing in some way throughout the

01:14:35 ►

entire hours of the session. And then a certain number of people come as observers, mothers with

01:14:42 ►

babies, and they all, you know, they camp out in the room and they just want to

01:14:45 ►

hear and be near this ceremony.

01:14:50 ►

And then after, and it goes on for, I mean, I don’t know if you want to hear the whole description

01:14:54 ►

of the session, it’s long, but they’re invocations.

01:14:58 ►

They, as I say, invoke every deity they’ve ever heard of as far as I could tell.

01:15:04 ►

And there are songs which are intended to occur toward the beginning,

01:15:11 ►

to bring a certain feeling into it, to bring an openness, to bring courage,

01:15:16 ►

and then songs to keep it good throughout.

01:15:21 ►

And we had experiences where strange feelings in one case it was clearly death

01:15:29 ►

was hovering near the building everything changed dogs were barking the air changed

01:15:36 ►

everyone shivered the babies began crying it was just heavy i mean everybody you know the hair

01:15:44 ►

went up on their back of their neck.

01:15:45 ►

It was very, very real. And the shaman stood up. He changed his song. He interrupted himself,

01:15:51 ►

which was very rare in his more meditative singing that we were all singing with,

01:15:59 ►

and jumped to his feet and stood in the middle of the room and began to vibrate outrageously all over

01:16:04 ►

until the vibrations went through his body into the floor of the building,

01:16:07 ►

which was on sort of short stilts, and shook the entire building,

01:16:11 ►

with all 28, 30 of us in it for quite a long time.

01:16:20 ►

And then finally he began all this blowing, which he did a whole lot of just

01:16:25 ►

and all of arm-waving stuff.

01:16:28 ►

And the feeling, the moon came out from behind a cloud.

01:16:33 ►

The feeling in the air changed.

01:16:35 ►

The babies quieted.

01:16:36 ►

The dogs shut up and it was gone.

01:16:39 ►

And everybody just, you know, acknowledged what had happened.

01:16:42 ►

And he sat back down and we proceeded with the session.

01:16:44 ►

Never was the word said about it.

01:16:46 ►

But it was really very authentic.

01:16:50 ►

It sounds a lot like some of the heavy peyote sessions that American Indians do, right?

01:16:57 ►

I personally have experimented with a whole number of psychedelics.

01:17:02 ►

I must say that I’ve never found that one psychedelic gives you a certain kind of vision

01:17:08 ►

and another and another.

01:17:09 ►

Never.

01:17:10 ►

No.

01:17:11 ►

I’ve always found that it had a lot to do with

01:17:13 ►

where I was at,

01:17:16 ►

a lot of other things,

01:17:18 ►

but the key, to me,

01:17:21 ►

all psychedelics are really keys.

01:17:22 ►

They open up that

01:17:24 ►

the reducing valve that Huxley talks about, to me, all psychedelics are really keys. They open up that reducing valve that Huxley talks about, you know.

01:17:29 ►

And once that’s open, whatever comes in, comes in.

01:17:34 ►

But for me, it has nothing to do with the psychedelic.

01:17:40 ►

I think we’d be hearing of the word, you know, like expire,

01:17:44 ►

a sense like it felt like I might die.

01:17:47 ►

Possibly one of you would like to address the relative non-toxicity of mushroom.

01:17:53 ►

Well, you see, it’s a funny thing.

01:17:55 ►

Now we’re talking about life and death, and when we need reassurance in that realm,

01:18:01 ►

we immediately turn to science and talk about the LD50.

01:18:08 ►

For those of you who don’t know, lethal dose 50.

01:18:12 ►

So pharmacologists are always asking of a given drug, what is its LD50?

01:18:17 ►

That means how much of it had to be given to 100 rats for 50 of them to die.

01:18:24 ►

it had to be given to 100 rats for 50 of them to die.

01:18:32 ►

Now, and LD50s are considered a relative measure of the safety of a drug.

01:18:37 ►

The LD50 for psilocybin is huge. I mean, something like 200 milligrams per kilogram of body weight.

01:18:46 ►

So that means to kill yourself with mushrooms,

01:18:49 ►

you would have to eat a dried,

01:18:51 ►

four and a half dried pounds or something like that.

01:18:55 ►

That’s what I wanted to emphasize,

01:18:58 ►

because people do,

01:19:00 ►

one of the basic fears that one may experience

01:19:03 ►

at a threshold dose is the fear of…

01:19:06 ►

Discorporation.

01:19:09 ►

And that is, if you can grasp the fact that you’re much worse off

01:19:14 ►

drinking a couple of cups of coffee generally,

01:19:17 ►

that can alleviate some of that particular fear.

01:19:21 ►

You might say, well, it’s not going to poison me all I have to do is keep breathing.

01:19:26 ►

If you’re logical, what seems to happen, unfortunately,

01:19:29 ►

is that logic flies out the window,

01:19:32 ►

and so people have a number of people have reported to us,

01:19:36 ►

after having taken mushrooms,

01:19:37 ►

that they became convinced in the middle of the trip,

01:19:39 ►

that someone had given them the wrong species,

01:19:42 ►

or that even if they’ve grown them themselves a couple of times that somehow

01:19:47 ►

You know I inoculated it with this species but a different species which is deadly poison grew and I ate it and now

01:19:53 ►

No one will ever know. Well a funny thing about this thinking you’re going to die

01:19:58 ►

If you tell a straight person this they say well

01:20:06 ►

Psychedelic drugs isn’t that the bit? You take it and you think

01:20:08 ►

you’re going to die and then you don’t

01:20:10 ►

and you’re so damn glad you didn’t

01:20:12 ►

that it’s like you’re ecstatic.

01:20:16 ►

But you know something else about the death,

01:20:19 ►

the near-death sensation

01:20:21 ►

on psychedelics is again about

01:20:24 ►

the ayahuasceros which is what the people who the ayahuascaos,

01:20:26 ►

which is what the people who make ayahuasca and administer it in the Amazon are called.

01:20:34 ►

They say that in order to become a great shaman,

01:20:39 ►

you need to be swallowed by the serpent, the anaconda.

01:20:43 ►

You know, an anaconda is a real snake. Big

01:20:45 ►

around is a log, 30 feet long. You hear stories when you’re down there. People say, yes, I was out

01:20:51 ►

hunting, and then the log I was standing on began to move, and then I realized, ah, you know,

01:20:56 ►

and they live in the river, and they live in the wet jungle. And it is the mythic animal,

01:21:01 ►

along with the jaguar, the two totems of the area. But to be swallowed by

01:21:08 ►

the Anaconda is the transformational experience, which takes you from being a dabbler to being

01:21:13 ►

really out there, to having gone truly between the worlds, you know. And one, a friend of

01:21:22 ►

ours, who’s an anthropologist, was down there interviewing Iowascaros one year on a number of topics.

01:21:28 ►

And one good fellow who didn’t have a lot of confidence, he was a middle-level healer, but not regarded in the area as a great one, said,

01:21:40 ►

I did my couple of years of the diet, I did my apprenticeship, I took ayahuasca many times,

01:21:48 ►

I took the other plants, I finally met the anaconda, and the anaconda was swallowing me head first,

01:21:54 ►

and I knew this was the moment that I had to go through to become a great shaman,

01:21:58 ►

but my fear got the best of me, and I fought my way out of his mouth.

01:22:03 ►

And so I’m just a, I’m just a mediocre shaman.

01:22:07 ►

You know, that was my chance.

01:22:09 ►

And that’s that surrendering to the fear of death

01:22:12 ►

and then coming out of it again.

01:22:15 ►

And to have a model like that,

01:22:17 ►

it’s a good one to remember to give you strength, I think.

01:22:19 ►

I think that played a great role in Egyptian theory, too,

01:22:25 ►

that you had to really go through the teeth of death

01:22:29 ►

and come out the other side.

01:22:35 ►

I’ve never taken ayahuasca.

01:22:38 ►

I’m wondering if, since, from what I understand,

01:22:42 ►

the empty is the effective component.

01:22:46 ►

When you’ve taken that,

01:22:48 ►

do you find that it’s

01:22:49 ►

a characteristic of

01:22:51 ►

his similarity to just

01:22:53 ►

pure DMT, or

01:22:56 ►

is it very different than that?

01:22:57 ►

No, it’s a lot like DMT

01:22:59 ►

in the

01:23:00 ►

center of the flash,

01:23:04 ►

but DMT unfolds over a minute or two

01:23:07 ►

and lasts three or four minutes.

01:23:10 ►

ayahuasca is more like mushrooms.

01:23:12 ►

It comes on at about the hour and 20 minute mark,

01:23:15 ►

and it comes in waves.

01:23:18 ►

And some of them,

01:23:20 ►

but when you really get it and you’re looking at it,

01:23:23 ►

you say, yes, this looks just exactly like DMT.

01:23:28 ►

You see, I suppose we should explain for people who aren’t familiar with it.

01:23:34 ►

DMT, if you were to eat it, would be destroyed in your gut by monoamines.

01:23:40 ►

Or monoamine oxidase.

01:23:43 ►

So the strategy in the Amazon

01:23:45 ►

is to take a plant with DMT in it

01:23:48 ►

and a plant with an monoamine oxidase inhibitor in it

01:23:53 ►

and combine the two into a beverage

01:23:56 ►

that can then be drunk.

01:23:58 ►

And then the DMT passes through to the brain.

01:24:02 ►

One of the great mysteries of ethno-pharmacology in the Amazon

01:24:06 ►

is how they ever figured this out.

01:24:10 ►

Because we’re talking about, you know,

01:24:12 ►

hundreds of thousands of species of plants,

01:24:15 ►

and in this case, it’s the leaves of one,

01:24:18 ►

boiled with the pulpy main body of another,

01:24:24 ►

placed together in a certain proportion,

01:24:27 ►

and then the thing works.

01:24:29 ►

And when you ask them, how is this done?

01:24:32 ►

They say, the plants have told us.

01:24:36 ►

And this seems a more likely explanation than anything anybody has been able to come up with.

01:24:41 ►

Some of you may know this book called the Shaman.

01:24:46 ►

No, what was Cordoba, Bruce Lamb’s second book called?

01:24:52 ►

The Rio Tigre and Beyond,

01:24:54 ►

where this guy who had learned how to make ayahuasca

01:24:57 ►

when he was kidnapped as a child by a deep forest tribe,

01:25:02 ►

when he then, in later life, becomes a rosewood and curare collector,

01:25:08 ►

he meets people in the jungle who are extremely,

01:25:16 ►

living in the natural state,

01:25:20 ►

very much uncontacted people.

01:25:23 ►

But when he takes their ayahuasca, he realizes that it’s garbage, that they don’t know

01:25:28 ►

how to make it.

01:25:29 ►

And then he makes it for them and shows them how to make it.

01:25:32 ►

And they’re just knocked off their feet and hail him as a cultural reformer.

01:25:37 ►

So it’s not always simply a matter of the uncontacted primitive, so-called primitive people

01:25:44 ►

have the skinny.

01:25:46 ►

It’s a technology. It’s a skill.

01:25:48 ►

It’s alchemy. These shamans

01:25:50 ►

each have their own recipe.

01:25:51 ►

They do it for a very long time.

01:25:53 ►

What kind of vessel you used to do it in?

01:25:56 ►

How old a plant is that you got?

01:25:59 ►

Your whole attitude and the very technical process,

01:26:04 ►

including, of course, the amounts of everything

01:26:06 ►

and how long it’s cooked to different stages and all this really creates a high that is then

01:26:13 ►

to the aesthetic, spiritual aesthetic taste of the preparer, which is an amazing thing.

01:26:19 ►

So, you know, ideally, if we weren’t such cultural aliens to them, you could just take

01:26:23 ►

an amazing trip through the jungles of South America

01:26:27 ►

and the lower mountains, a cloud forest, where they do this as well.

01:26:32 ►

Trying recipes, you know, like a wine-tasting tour.

01:26:35 ►

It would be amazing.

01:26:36 ►

Similar to a tour of Burgundy and Provence.

01:26:41 ►

But something I want to say before we leave this

01:26:43 ►

is as you think about natural drug complexes around the world,

01:26:49 ►

the interesting thing to notice about ayahuasca

01:26:52 ►

is that unlike peyote or mushrooms

01:26:56 ►

or the Bogga cults of Africa

01:26:59 ►

or the morning glory cults of central Mexico

01:27:02 ►

or cannabis,

01:27:05 ►

different from all of these is the fact

01:27:07 ►

that it’s a combinator preparation.

01:27:11 ►

And in practical terms,

01:27:13 ►

what that suddenly means is a person is involved,

01:27:18 ►

the person who makes it,

01:27:20 ►

for the first time we’re getting a chemist into the picture,

01:27:25 ►

an alchemist, a teacher, if you want,

01:27:28 ►

because ayahuasca, unlike mushrooms and all these other things,

01:27:32 ►

is only as good as the person who made it.

01:27:36 ►

Where mushrooms, you don’t have to worry about that in quite the same way.

01:27:41 ►

A mushroom is ready to go when it comes out of the ground. The ayahuasca is a

01:27:47 ►

combinator drug, and so it brings the human interaction and the lore of it into a much more

01:27:54 ►

central position. This is something to bear in mind if you’re thinking of going to the

01:28:00 ►

Amazon to take ayahuasca, you’re going to have a people experience because the only

01:28:06 ►

way to it is through people. You could have a mushroom experience in Mexico by simply finding

01:28:14 ►

the mushroom, you know.

01:28:16 ►

And you know, this question of, is the, are the plant drugs animated or not? And is it just

01:28:22 ►

us? Was addressed by Albert Hoffman when we spend a weekend at a conference.

01:28:26 ►

Then he’s, as you probably know, the inventor or discoverer of LSD.

01:28:32 ►

We asked him how he felt about the mushrooms.

01:28:35 ►

That’s what we were talking about.

01:28:36 ►

Silicibin.

01:28:36 ►

Silicibin, yes, and even psilocybin laboratory psilocybin.

01:28:41 ►

And he said, there’s somebody in there. He didn’t like it. There’s somebody in there. Yeah, he said, I don’t like said, there’s somebody in there.

01:28:45 ►

He didn’t like it.

01:28:46 ►

There’s somebody in there.

01:28:47 ►

And he said, I don’t like it.

01:28:48 ►

There’s somebody in there.

01:28:49 ►

Yeah, yeah.

01:28:51 ►

I said, you mean that it’s too animated?

01:28:54 ►

And he said, yes.

01:28:56 ►

He likes it just crystal clear.

01:28:58 ►

Swiss philosophy.

01:29:00 ►

That’s what he’s into.

01:29:04 ►

And I quote,

01:29:06 ►

Are we sharing the planet with something older, wiser, and deeper than we are?

01:29:12 ►

End quote.

01:29:13 ►

So asked Terrence McKenna over 35 years ago.

01:29:17 ►

I think you can see why his talks were so fascinating back then.

01:29:21 ►

At the time this was recorded,

01:29:22 ►

there was concern about the Y2K problem in the coming

01:29:26 ►

year 2000, and then there was the Mayan calendar coming to an end, not to mention the unsettling

01:29:31 ►

world events that were also unfolding all around it. No wonder we loved his somewhat positive

01:29:37 ►

spin on the doom and gloom of the world. For some of us, however, our escape into the world of

01:29:43 ►

Terence McKenna’s ideas was our main bulwark against our family’s attempts to bring us back, once again, to their religious beliefs.

01:29:52 ►

It was more interesting for us to talk about the time wave and magic mushrooms than it was to rehash the old religious folk tales that we’d been fed when we were children.

01:30:02 ►

Now, if you’re one of my Patreon supporters, you’re familiar with my postings of the audio of the

01:30:07 ►

live salons we have every week.

01:30:09 ►

And if you read some of my accounts of what was discussed, you might have thought that

01:30:14 ►

some of these conversations were a bit disjointed.

01:30:17 ►

However, had I also made a note of the different topics that Terrence just covered,

01:30:22 ►

my guess is that I would think it came from one of our live salons. For me, this talk by Terrence McKenna could have been given recently, not over 35 years ago

01:30:31 ►

as it was. So, in another 35 years, I wonder if people will listen to this talk and still

01:30:38 ►

think it relevant to their age. Lately, I’ve been hearing that ancient Chinese quote about

01:30:44 ►

interesting times being repeated

01:30:46 ►

quite frequently. If only they were simply interesting and not also dangerous, wouldn’t that be a

01:30:52 ►

relief? As I say when closing the live salons, the best answer that I have as to how to say positive

01:31:00 ►

in the face of world events right now is to keep the old faith and stay high.

01:31:06 ►

And on that positive note, I’m signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:31:11 ►

Namaste, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

Podcast 700 – Plants That Talk

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Program Notes

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