Terence McKenna: Psilocybin, Consciousness & Reality

[00:00:01]as you know it is now understood that we are really not one person we have many personalities a multiple personality disorder is simply when you Manifest this on a level that irritates other people multiple personality order is when you have them all lined up in a row and the right ones always talk to the same people and so the illusion is maintained well in the same way that you know if you had a big mirror you look in the mirror and you see a reflection of yourself but now if you lift the mirror up and bring it down on the ground and shatter it what you see now are is not a shattered reflection of yourself but hundreds of little reflections of yourself each one whole well may it not be then that what DMT does is it shatters the illusion of the self and says you're not a self you're a tribe of selves and here they are dancing performing singing uh they they are the fractal adumbrations of the personality that was the buzz word that I wanted to get in they are the fractal adumbrations of Personality basically this is a a workshop to discuss the interaction between plants and human beings uh specifically the psychological and mental independent penetration of these two very different kinds of life forms and uh let me just lay out some of the the field uh human beings began uh their career well we can trace it back to the primordial slime I suppose but uh our our animal career be was a career of insectivorous vegetarian and fruit Ian ISM lived out in the arboreal canopies of tropical rainforests and all uh all animal species indeed all life tends to uh occupy an evolutionary Niche and then stabilize itself in that Niche uh termites cockroaches these sorts of organisms found their Niche hundreds of millions of years ago and filled it to Perfection and have occupied it ever since generally nature is not Progressive in its particulars overall nature is Progressive but its particulars uh seek equilibrium and so it would have been in the case of our primate ancestors they achieved uh a dynamical balance as I said A Diet of insects and fruit a canopy habitat uh a a language of pack signaling designed to convey danger and information about food sources and so forth and so on and there they would have remained uh had it not been for the larger ecodynamics of the planet ecodynamics which are still shaping uh uh Human Habitat in Africa because what has been going on in Africa for at least 5 million years is a slow drying of the continent and it disrupted this uh rainforest ecology so that about 2 to 4 million years ago I mean these are vast spans of time we're talking about the rainforest began to Island itself and to be restricted to the wetter areas of Africa and into the new environment the more zerotic or erid environment that was coming into being uh a very diminished plant Community took hold a community of uh opportunistic grasses uh annuals heavy seeders this sort of thing now we know that the rainforest was primary because the rainforest just to give you a broad notion might consist of uh over 100,000 plant species the grassland ecosystem might well consist of under 500 species and all 500 grassland species can be found as rare members of the Flora of the rainforest so clearly what we have are the survivors of a process of clearing and there is argument among botus about this but Carl SAU who was a great geographer and thinker on these matters held that there is no such thing as a natural grassland that grasslands are the early earliest artifacts of human impact on the planet grasslands are created by burning uh uh they promote uh the growth of cereals uh and and so play a feed in to the human uh uh food chain so our uh primate ancestors ecological adaptation to our Boreal life was interruped by this process uh and key to my thinking about all this and those of you who are going to have careers in all this I hope some of you will take it up and adumbrate it I think the great overlooked factor in any model of human evolution and indeed in uh evolutionary models of many other species is we have not given enough uh emphasis to diet when we talk about natural selection of an animal species we tend to think that uh the genome expresses a physical type and the phenotype is then subject to selection by natural environment some biologists have seen the the thinness of this understanding LL white wrote a book called internal factors in evolution in which he he pointed out that the womb is itself an environment that makes a very heavy selection before an organism is ever born into the theater of darwinian selection so it isn't a taraso that you're born into the theater of natural selection you have been subject to Natural Selection from the very earliest moments of the existence of the zygote uh so that's one factor uh but what I have emphasized is diet diet is uh an input of potentially mutogenic factors into the body that can have enormous consequences uh on the health of an individual or the general Evolution uh of a population and I've used the the toolbox of ideas that I'm going to put forward here today and tomorrow to try and address what seems to me to be one of the most centrally interesting questions uh to be asked of this world and that is what is human consciousness where did it come from and why does it exist at all uh and I believe that we can by thinking about psychoactive plants diet and the early human evolutionary situation we can make a lot of progress uh on this question and we can illuminate some of our political dilemmas that persist to this day the gender friction uh the typifies Human Society the hierarchy structures and the tensions they create so forth and so on so let me run through this and get it off my chest and then we can talk about the larger uh uh Materia Meda of of uh of psychoactive change relative to to plants as the rainforest retreated our remote primate ancestors came under nutritional pressure obviously because their area for Gathering food was being physically diminished now when a uh as you probably know or have observed most animal species are very particular about their food intake and if you've ever tries to Tred to raise butterflies or something for your children uh you know that if you capture a caterpillar in the wild but don't pay close attention to the plant you find it on you can't just put grass in a peanut butter jar with a caterpillar and expect great success animals are highly specialized in their choice of foods why is this well as near as we can tell uh eating all kinds of foods from an evolutionary point of view is a very Reckless move indeed because plants represent um uh chemical smorgus Boards of various types that have accumulated over time in the the Genome of a particular organism if you have a very broad-based diet you are exposing yourself to many different kinds of mutagenic influences as a strategy for survival of a species this is not good uh much better to specialize to evolve special enzymatic Pathways to deal with toxins so for instance we know certain animals can eat things that other animals would become ill from or even die uh and this is the way it's done and all animal species tend to evolve toward these very Bland uh mono diets now what happens when uh there is an upheaval in an environment uh a geomagnetic reversal a volcanic eruption a drought something like that and ordinary sources of nutrition become restricted then an organism has basically two choices it can uh go extinct starve itself out of existence or if it has more flexible behaviors it can begin to experiment with previously rejected potential Foods in the environment rejected probably because of uh strong taste or something like that which are Clues to the presence of marginally acceptable chemical compounds of some sort our remote canopy living ancestors as I mentioned were frari and insectivores they under nutrition ntional pressure began to expand their repertoire of foods they also began to explore the grassland environment and I mentioned that the grassland environment is much poorer in in total number of plant species than the rainforest thus and logically the potential number of of food sources is also limited baboons and chimpanzees will dig with sticks for the corns the swollen roots of grasses uh so as our remote ancestors began to explore this new environment of the grasslands they also began to explore new dietary items uh and one of the items that they would surely have uh observed are coidic mushrooms mushrooms which prefer dung as their environment cilic or copper fiic is the word for this many of these species of copper fiic mushrooms allab at psilocybin which as I assume you know is uh one of the major psychoactive alkaloids uh psilocybin occurs in many species of mushroom it's unknown outside of the the fungi uh and but I maintain that in a sense psilocybin is the uh is the best model for human interaction with a psychedelic or that all other psychoactive plant usages are an effort to do duplicate return to or somehow evoke the original human relationship uh to psilocybin and here is uh this and and it is not simply its psychoactive properties that makes psilocybin a potential Catalyst for human consciousness it is its psychoactive properties in combination with certain other properties that make it uh uniquely suited to carry out the role of cat of catalysis of Consciousness in a higher animal what are these unique characteristics well first of all uh in very low doses psilocybin uh increases visual Acuity if you want to go back into the literature Rand Fisher uh in the middle 60s uh took graduate students and gave them small amounts of psilocybin or Placebo and he built an apparatus where two parallel strips of metal could be deformed uh by winding a crank and he asked people to uh uh push a button when the two strips seem to them to cease to be parallel and he demonstrated that edge detection is enhanced by small amounts of psilocybin well you don't have to be a rocket scientist to realize that edge detection is at a very high premium in any grassland situation where predation is taking place the the Li moving in the grass 300 yard away as it creeps upon your camp or the gazelle trying to slip away through the tall grass from your Hunting Party Edge detection is the key to success or failure in hunting in that kind of a situation and uh it's extraordinary uh that uh we can statistically demonstrate this improved visual accuity occurring uh in the presence of psoc and what it would have done you see is these Proto hominids who would accept the psilocybin into their diet would have a slightly enhanced success in hunting that slightly enhanced hunting success would mean more nutritional resources available for them and their offspring Offspring presumably inculcated into the habit of also eating the mushrooms so what we have here is a slight favoring then of those animals in the population that would accept psilocybon into the diet uh at slightly higher levels psilocybin is uh like all CNS stimulants uh causes arousal and arousal is simply a feeling of unfocused restlessness you know it's that two espresso feeling uh sleep is impossible hands are busy at small tasks one is aware of one's sphere of awareness extends out somewhat further uh and in highly sexed animals like primates arousal means erection in the male and this is very important for this Theory because we not only have to account for human consciousness but we have to account for the peculiar dislocation that human consciousness seems to carry with it that we are both of nature yet not of nature somehow creatures with one foot in nature and one foot in heaven and how does this uh come about uh I believe and I'm you know willing to argue it against all comers that a key element to understanding our so our sociology and our sexual politics and all that is to realize that coccion had two effects in the early human populations that were using it one we're very familiar with if we're psychedelic sophisticates ourselves it's the Psychedelic experience the boundary dissolving hallucinatory shamanic uh apotheosis that occurs with cocy but the other effect is to uh medicate the tendency to form dominance hierarchies and this is very controversial in other words what I'm saying is that all primates form dominance hierarchies and what that means just to remind you is that the hardbodied long fanged young males take control of the group they control the children the women they order the old the homosexual and the young everybody is under their thumb and uh part of our dilemma as a global Society is that though we claim great sophistication we still live under male dominance hierarchies corporations universities family structures you know long fanged males are still ordering around the elderly the weak and the female Among Us and it's and as we are conscious beings and reflect upon this it creates great social dislocation and political unhappiness and tension in relationships and so forth and so on I believe that our unique position in the animal world arose as a consequence of a chemical suppression of a natural behavior pattern the pattern of male dominance of forming dominance hierarchies was interrupted by an item in the diet psilocybin and into this chaos this egalitarian chaos which resulted was uh a situation in which everything about us that we treasure and hold up as human was put in place in other words theater Language Dance Story altruism ethics uh metaphysics did I say poetry everything that makes us human came into being roughly a 100,000 in the last well from 100,000 to about 15,000 years ago people lived in balance with the Earth with the larger biome in which they were embedded uh uh there was not product fetishism ushering into enormous toxic uh uh processes involving the smelting of metals or the extraction of rare elements from the earth uh now you could object and say well but they just weren't sophisticated enough to do those things I maintain that our technical sophistication is a very specialized form of cultural adaptation and that comparing us and finding us favorably compared to the civilization of Homer or chatal yuk or alamira is is simply a form of cultural chauvinism okay but cybin had other effects besides this suppression of male dominance that I mentioned and this increased sexual thing which I did mention but I didn't draw the correct conclusion there if you have a uh something in your food which is to put it crudely acting as an aphrodisiac then it is reasonable to expect that you will have more pregnancies and reasonable to expect that you will therefore have uh again a tendency to outbreed the nons ayban using members of the population so we have two factors here increased visual Acuity which gives greater uh food Gathering uh capacity increased sexual activity which tends to outbreed uh the non uh psilocybon imbibing members of the group and then on top of all this you have this ecstatic internal state for which we with all our cultural and epistemic sophistication are still unable to come to terms The Mystery of the Psychedelic uh experience now these things taken together with other factors working in parallel created I think the dilemma and the glory and the opportunity of humanness once we began under nutritional pressure to expand our diet we were delicately poised on the edge of omnivorousness because recall in the canopy situation we were insectivores our remote ancestors we were not simply vegetarians we were Inc fors in the grassland environment we began probably to uh originally to uh follow along behind lion kills and that sort of thing and eat caran one evolutionary theory says that our suppressed olfactory apparatus the fact that we have a very limited sense of smell is because there was a period in our Evolution we did a lot of rooting around in carcasses this is not the noble image we might might have wished but there it is if you need a counterveiling theory because you don't like that one the other theory is no we lost our sense of smell because when we stood upright we got our faces up off the ground and that's where the smells are anyway so it all sort of became useless equipment uh and we dropped it for a long time therefore up let's say I mean numbers are numbers but let's say from 50,000 years ago to 12,000 years ago there was a kind of paradise on this planet poetry coexisted with uh uh a balanced ecosystem uh observational Sciences astronomy botany biology taxonomy the observational Sciences coexisted with the natural world and then the same factors which created this emic situation which remember what they were it was the drying of the African continent that caused the rain forest retreat that same process had been going on slowly inevitably endlessly and about between well after the last glacial melt which began 20 to 17,000 years ago Africa went dramatically dry and the Sahara Desert began to form where there had been a vast grassland dotted by Sandstone Pinnacles cut by rushing streams and crowded with uh vast herds of gain and that was the theater of human emergence but when it began to go dry it went dry rather dramatically these ice cores coming out of Iceland make this clear nevertheless as late as Roman times the Roman historian Pliny referred to North Africa as the Bread Basket of Rome because they were growing wheat in vast amounts in North Africa as recently as 2,000 years ago in areas now where there is nothing well uh this paradic African psilocybin matriarchal partnership uh psychedelic shamanic archaic whatever you want to call it Society was then pushed into crisis and a number of things happened first of all migrations of people out of Africa uh this happens every time there's a glacial melt human populations were trapped or Proto homant populations get trapped during the glacials because the last glacial period the glaciers came as far south as uh as Northern Israel uh so human populations get trapped and then in the interglacials during the melts they radiate outward uh people began leaving the Sahara settling in the Nile Valley and the use this shamanic use of psilocybin was disrupted because the environment which made it possible was disrupted and when that happened and this I'm closing the loop here for you few of my wraps are so sustained when when that happened the pattern of male dominance the pattern that was genetically never removed but which had been pharmacologically suppressed for over a 100 thousand years perhaps reasserted itself with a Vengeance it was always there it had never been bred out and it must have been an era of enormous brutality when people sense of things was that people were turning bad suddenly we get uh uh a whole bunch of things come at once uh an end to nomadism the beginnings of sedentary archit agriculture city building uh standing armies slavery male kingship dominance all of these things appear just almost overnight they spring up and I maintain they are what a monkey would build as a civilization if suddenly all of its worst behavioral Tendencies came to the Forefront with a Vengeance and that's precisely what happened in the period when we were self-medicating ourselves with psilocybin we passed from being an animal into being the peculiarly spiritual entity that we are we elaborated observational techniques uh theories of magic language but when the psilocybin was withdrawn these tools which had been in our Glory became instead our curse because instead of using them to produce theater and dance and ecstatic social interaction we began to use them to support the new and older agenda of male dominance and it's a frightening thing you know to think people following their cattle across the African plane uh eating the mushrooms seeing the mushrooms as part of the output of the cattle in the same way that meat and milk and manure were output of the cattle a mother goddess religion a religion of the land that moves lightly over the soil uh no evidence of of Intergroup conflict so forth and so on and somehow then this process which took a long time of domesticating cattle because I'm sure you see you can see how it all worked how these factors were disperate and then they flowed together human beings followed cattle because they were following uh kills of lions uh you follow the cattle in the same way that the jackals follow the cattle to deal with the lion kills made by large Predators well then you in the course of this you encounter uh weakened animals or abandoned uh infant animals and you care for them and over 20,000 years this turns into domestication of animals husbandry of cat but uh you take away the silicion and I I think this is a frightening thing to contemplate the earliest cities I will argue were pens for human beings that's what a city is it's a pen for human beings some of these dominant males said well we control cattle why shouldn't we control human beings in the same way why shouldn't a king order his people in with the same impunity that he orders the slaughter the movement of herds of goats and cattle and all of the institutions that we labor under came into being at this moment of transition from the late Neolithic or or from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic to the agricultural uh situation the reason for this I believe can be traced to EV the evolution of Consciousness I mean Consciousness is a double edged sword uh at the very one of the factors I think that contributed to the reemergence of male dominance was that at some point human intellectual capacity reached a point where a distant cause could be connected to an effect and the effect and cause that were being observed was uh the sex act at some point men and women presumably but men must have understood that an act of copulation if carried out successfully and in the right Rhythm to the moon will result in a child 9 months later if you don't have that understanding you have no sense of male paternity so you have a very tight social Bond because for men the children are our children the children of the group once you have a sense of male paternity then you have ownership and this then uh becomes very problematic at the very moment that men were figuring this out women were noticing that in the yearly round of follow in the cattle when they would return to the kitchen middens and fire pits abandoned a year previously that there would be food in those areas an abundance of food plants from cast off kernels of cereals and so forth and so on so then there is this awareness if we bury food if we bury food sources then food will come out of the ground the problem with agriculture in the early phase is that it's hideously efficient and what it does is it immediately creates a such a surplus that you have to stop moving nomadism has to be abandon you till fields and you overproduce and then you must store and defend your over production against less fortunate human groups in the area the most advanced building on this planet in 10,000 uh 8,000 BC was uh the grain Tower at Jericho and and what was it it was a grain storage Tower and it had a staircase so that you could carry large rocks up onto the parapet so that you could drop them onto the heads of enemies who were trying to batter their way into your grain Tower so I I've spent some time on this because uh this could be taught this course without any reference to our contemporary dilemma which is a uh and by that dilemma I mean the Dilemma of gender difference male dominance under you ization of females in society under utilization of feminine points of view in society but obviously there is a lot of tension in our society around the issue of psychedelic intoxication around the issue of these shamanic plants though there is a growing awareness among sophisticated people that the case is almost entirely emotional in other words we tolerate outlandishly toxic drugs alcohol tobacco uh we're willing to make a tradeoff of 70,000 deaths a year in this country for the privilege of driving the automobile so forth and so on WE tolerate very toxic practices if they are seen to be somehow uh supportive of the agenda being handed down from the top psychedelics are not and they are seen as tremendously disruptive and yet as the ethnographic and pharmacological data comes in they are among the most benign uh uh substances in the world and uh their history of human usage is almost Universal and then the question is do these intoxications limit the spectrum of Consciousness and allow hierarchical models to be handed down and brainwashed into the doubters or do these states of Consciousness dissolve cultural assumptions and cast the individual into a an ocean of existential perplexity out of which they have to build uh their own model of how the world works well uh I believe the reason for this tension in our society and anxiety and suppression Furious suppression of these things is because we sense that this addresses origins in the same way that it took a long time to overcome our our queas about discussing sexuality there's something about the origin subjects that make us very very uh nervous okay so that's a very linear discussion of the role of one psychoactive plant in human history psilocybin and as I say I think it was uniquely chemically botanically uh positioned to play that role in human consciousness uh now the Contemporary situation worldwide is that that we find uh many forms of shamanism from the Arctic to the rainforest tropics and Shamanism always depends for its uh efficacy on a dislocation or a transformation of ordinary Consciousness and we see this achieved in many different ways uh through fasting through ordeal meaning abandonment in the wilderness or or flagellation uh through uh elaborate theatrical effects special effects uh through the use of of substances in plans and there has been a controversy in anthropology never resolved uh over the past 40 years uh what is the authentic Shamanism and those of you who are anthropologists know that uh melad who was one of the great uh experts in this field claimed he called use of plants in a shamanic context decadent he called the the use of such plants narcotic well first of all the use of the word narcotic in that context shows you don't know what you're talking about in terms of pharmacology that's an totally Obsolete and silly category and not true to boot psychedelics are in no sense narcotic uh Gordon Watson on the other hand who was a a brilliant amateur and the discoverer of the pilosyan Cults in Mexico along with his partner and wife Valentina wson took just the opposite position and said no use of plants to transform Consciousness is the primary method where there are is resort to ordeal fasting Wilderness abandonment uh so forth and so on this is the derivative late arriving decadent Shamanism in fact this is Shamanism on its way to turning into religion of the ordinary sort and in fact if we look at religion of the ordinary sort we see that it does have a place for fasting it does have a place for self flagellation uh it it does have it does admit those techniques but no organized religion of any size tolerates the use of psychedelics in Consciousness transforming amounts and that little parenthetical phrase is there because one of the things that you should know and remember and keep always in front of you is that if you wish to control someone or if you want to brainwash somebody the way you do it is with small amounts of drugs and large amounts of your message whatever it is so uh you know but but if you give people large amounts of a psychedelic your message will take its place in the parade of ideas and find its relative importance uh so so using drugs is does not mean if you come upon a cult or a group or an individual using psychedelic substance it doesn't necessarily mean that they are on a path of spiritual and shamanic transformation it may be that they just are self-enforcing some private Idaho of Illusion in which they choose to live but if large doses are being taken and by large I simply mean effective full spectrum doses one of the wonderful things about these substances is that the effective dose is a long ways away from a dangerous dose the LD in other words is very favorable um the boundary dis well so then let me talk for a minute about the character of this experience generally what is the plant hogen experience in all times and all places for all people I mean I don't know if you can be that General but it's important to try what it is is it's an experience of boundary dissolution it's an experience of having categories obliterated of having previously defined boundaries and differences uh eliminated the Enterprise of being and the Enterprise of language is basically an Enterprise of defining boundaries I am myself you are you this is now that was then we are here they are there these are provisions uh distinctions about reality that make it necessary that are necessary for us to keep track of and manipulate our animal body as a machine uh in Newtonian space but when a shaman takes a a psychoactive plant at an effective dose he or she falls into trance becomes immobile and then the geometry of Consciousness if you wish is uh melted and recast in a different geometry and and I use these mathematical terms because I really sincerely believe that at some hypothetical future date when this is all sorted out what we're going to realize about the Psychedelic experience is that it is the experience of the fact of the higher geometry of the universe in which we live in other words it's very easy to see that ordinary conscious uh evolved to well let me put it this way it's a wonderful aphorism Consciousness takes the Contours of the vessel into which it is poured it's like water it always takes the shape of the vessel into which it is poured and so what are we we are uh on on the large scale we are animals in three-dimensional space given to hunting and given to being hunted so what has conscious ious done it has evolved into a kind of threat anticipation detection and avoidance uh machine the purpose of Consciousness the purpose of your eyes the coordination of your Sensa is to navigate you through the world without dying without being ripped apart by Predators or being caught in landslides or rushing Rivers so forth and so on and Consciousness fills that need ordinary Consciousness very well but if because the body is a has a Locus in three-dimensional space consciousness of the ordinary sort tends to surround the body as an object of concern in other words if if you're worried about tra being hit by traffic you're not being you're not worried about being hit by traffic in Berkeley you're worried about being hit in traffic in San Francisco because that's where you happen to be so consciousness of the ordinary sord tends to Cluster around the physical body but when Consciousness is dissolved of that concern and dissolved of the programming in language that that concern has built up over ages it recrystallizes in a higher Dimension literally a kind of hyperspace and if you will think for a moment about Shamanism I think you'll see how literally we can take this mathematical metaphor of the Psychedelic experience what is a classic Shaman expected to do and be well shamans uh predict hunting they see where the game will be shamans predict weather they they can tell what the weather will be uh shamans are brought in to mediate complex social hassles of the who is sleeping with my woman who stole the chicken uh you know who shat in the Stream kind of social hassles shamans are brought in for the these kinds of purposes and then finally and most importantly shamans cure they cure sometimes well now these things predicting the weather seeing where the game went uh curing and having a deep insight into social interaction these are things which become completely non mysterious if we hypothesize that the shaman has a hyperspatial point of view you know if you went into a mathematical hyp if we had a safe here and we could go into hyperspace we would discover that the safe is open that there is a words are difficult here but there is a side of the safe or let's say a dimension to the safe which isn't locked in the same way that if a hyperspatial entity were looking down on San Francisco it could reach into this room without coming through the door and rearrange things in other words everything that we call Magic seeing the future seeing into locked boxes knowing what is going to happen becomes utterly non- mysterious if you hypothesize that Consciousness can unfold itself under this peculiar pharmacodynamic situation into a higher dimensional space and that becomes important uh in the modern context more than in the archaic context because the the collective future has become for us a a a focus of major anxiety we need to know where we're going you know Marshall mcclan said the way we run our societies is like driving an automobile using only the rear view mirror while in shamanic guided societies they actually turn on the headlights uh running by the rearview mirror means you you only have past experience to guide you running with the headlights on means you actually have an insight into the forward uh Dimension into what into which you're moving okay so that is sort of a broad sketch of how one plant psilocybin may have catalyzed shape impacted human consciousness how the abandonment of that archaic monic style through climatic change created the fall into history how the fall into history is the absence of this hyperdimensional point of view and then what we'll talk about when we come back after the break is how can we utilize the Botanical and ethnographic and pharmacological data that we have garnered in the last 100 years to re capture revivify and explore this dimension of human potential in such a way that we can actually inject uh some hope into our political circumstances I don't believe if we remain as we are half angel half monkey ruled by dominant hierarchies ruled by the most ruthless Among Us that we have much of a future on The evolutionary stage but but I think that if we can recapture the Lost symbi is with these psychoactive plants that we will in fact be recovering a lost portion of ourselves that history is a progressive dehumanizing of The Human Experience and we have now in the 20th century reached the level of dehumanizing where you've got the Holocaust thermal potential thermonuclear war Bosnia Rwanda you name it I mean the scale of brutality brutalness bruess in the 20th century indicates to me that the struggle for the soul of humanity is reaching uh an incredibly intense uh Crescendo and uh I I really believe that the path forward is backward that we need an archaic revival and that Central to that Revival will be the personality and the technology of shamanism and when we analyze that technology for its Effectiveness we will discover that the most interesting things in the shamanic toolbox are uh the plants which directly intervene in the functioning of human consciousness so let's just take a standup five minute break so you can stretch and then I've talked without questions this session I'm perfectly happy to entertain questions if you want to control the agenda you're going to have to make some noise so so are there questions to this point or shall I just keep pling well I think the implication is yes uh in other words had we remained monkeys we never would have gotten into this crazy situation we became Human by forming a relationship a symbiotic relationship with a psychoactive plant and then we became semi human when we abandoned it and that's what we are now semi-human you know we're capable of enormous acts of kindness and appalling acts of brutality uh I think conscious self-reflection can help here I mean if you know this story and believe it and if evidence God knows what evidence would look like but if evidence could be found to support it then it makes it easier to understand our dilemma I mean men don't want to dominate and it's not a manom issue either uh personality the the ego is a sort of genderless way of attacking this thing the ego was suppressed by siloc cybin and in the absence of psilocybin men and women became much more egocentric and that egocentricity created all kinds of Institutions which are very uh unflattering to us so uh we we need I think to if if this idea were accepted that this is what happened this is why we're conscious this is why we're so uncomfortable with Consciousness and this is where we are and somehow this dialogue could go on outside the distorting effects of Christianity male anxiety and so forth and so on then I think the conclusion would be we need some very radical social reforms uh not simply obviously the legalization of spiritual transformation through substances uh but all of our institutions have been built up on the Assumption of ego and and dominance hierarchy and deconstructing that is really what the future is all about I think and it's a it's a challenge I don't call it matter focal I call it partnership um I don't think there's a pendulum swing between patriarchy and matriarchy I think there is partnership which is appropriate role expression everybody does what is appropriate to their position and then there is the assigned role of the of the of the hierarchical situation I think it was in science last week here is a frontier that is breaking right now which is uh it just being realized that men and women are incredibly different uh anatomically and at the microanatomical level I I think there was a list of 40 physical differences in between the brains of men and women and in a sense uh and I'm this is pure speculation but I believe that especially in the archaic situation well we don't even have to talk about the archaic situation in 1800 the average American Woman gave birth 13 times the average American woman in 1800 so you put a a statistic like that against the phenomenon of menstruation and what you have then when you look at women is a life absolutely rooted in The rhythms and the fact of nature men are sort of it's more like a closed system it's sealed off uh and there isn't this connection into the biological world so men are potential more capable of getting off the track if you want to put it that way meaning leaving this Guan Creo of symbiotic self-reinforcement it's very obvious in the years I've been doing this this looks to me like a fairly balanced group but my groups are tend to be heavily male and women in my own experience tend to be far more casual psychedelic users than men if you just look at cannabis use usually when women are very casual a a woman who is truly a smoker is a rare rare thing here's the way I put it ego is like a a Cy which will begin to grow in you whether you are male or female unless you take a psychedelic the Psychedelic is that it will dissolve this cyst the cyst is in your personality it's a tumor it shouldn't be there I mean we do need to have egos little egos so that when I take you out to dinner I put the food I order in my mouth you put the food you order in your mouth that's what an ego is for but if I start giving you orders then that's completely inappropriate so rather than genderize it which I think is a mistake because let's face it after thousands of years of this maladaptive cultural style many women are hard driving egomaniacal ambitious uh it's a bad style and you may men may be born into it and women may be infected by it but there's plenty of it around in men and women obviously not everyone uh should take psychedelic plan well then the question automatically follows well who shouldn't well uh in Practical terms we all know people who are lightly here who have diminished self-esteem uh so forth and so on uh they are for them ego dissolution is not the goal they have been so victimized by ego Maniacs that they have no sense of self so for them they should be encouraged to build up an internal structure in their personality and a coherent reference point in the self but that is a a u uh a state of disease that most of us are not like that most of us are ordinary or more toward the spectrum of ego dominance and and we profit from the Psychedelic experience women I think are less excited by psychedelics because they experience by and large it had less of an impact I mean I've seen many many people change their lives on a dime like after a big LSD trip but most of those people were men most of those people were were men yeah once this African paradisical partnership thing was disrupted and people were SC scattered to the four corners of the Earth the memory never was lost and there is even what's called a Nostalgia for Paradise today throughout time the belief that in the past it was better and since the Renaissance it's been fashionable to dismiss this as a kind of naive you know the grass is greener kind of thing but I think probably things were better and that our Nostalgia for Paradise is what has caused us to be so such so subject to abuse and use of drugs you know no other animal shares this pattern of Behavior Uh sometimes elephants will push down fences to get to rotting fruit and birds get drunk and fall down on their little feeders and this sort of thing but but human beings addict to a startling Spectrum not only of substances but of behaviors we addict to each other I mean a heroin withdrawal and a broken heart look and feel exactly the same way you know abandonment bursting into tears insomnia inability to eat uh I mean does this person have a broken heart or are they getting off junk you can't tell and I we we tend uh to addict and I think this is a kind of we feel in ourselves a certain incompleteness since the breakup of the African partnership society and you know alcohol doesn't quite do it uh cannabis is good but it doesn't quite go far enough um we've tried all kinds of things and interestingly in the last 100 years the science of ethnography and anthropology has scoured the world and brought back to us data which we didn't have 100 120 years ago data about peyote iasa detura siloc cybin uh Morning Glory so forth and so on the material medicia of the of the remote human cultures of the planet is is now available and I think uh it comes not a moment too late that's why I called my book the archaic revival I really see the whole cultural impulse of the 20th century as an Impulse toward the archaic in other words if you think about it it begins with impressionism what is Impressionism except LSD 30 minutes in in other words the sharpness goes the colors brighten everything begins to blur the boundaries are beginning to dissolve it's contentless it's I mean it's theologically empty it's just how things look they look this certain way well then uh 20 minutes later ideas are being getting to accompany this melting and flowing of perception that's we've now reached surrealism and Freud and Yung the discovery of the unconscious well then it keeps going it gets more and more intense now we don't see Dreamscapes distorted gargoyle like figures melting watches and burning giraffes that has all been now replaced by just a blur an energy storm now we're in a pollock of some sort uh we're down at the quantum mechanical level where energy is flinging itself around and at the same time things like jazz which carried with it a heavy content of sexual looseness the flapper era that whole thing people weren't Victorian ladies and gentlemen that they had the cannibalistic Drive the edible Drive the this drive the Hitler proved that you know 500 years of Western ethics have you shoving people into ovens as a political course of action the whole of the 20th century has been an exploration of the archaic and then in the 60s LSD appeared but without the rhetoric of shamanism LSD for those of us who lived through it was presented as the latest thing after penicillin and birth control it was Better Living Through Chemistry it was now we have Penicillin and now we have Oran Noam and now we have uh LSD was Better Living Through Chemistry you've all seen the poster of the got kids in the hate holding the banner uh uh in the 70s it was realized that the Psychedelic experience need not be confined to LSD generally realized and that there were all these ethnographic usages iasa peyote detura morning glories so forth and so on and uh then late in the 70s the shaman became the paradigmatic figure for cultural emulation and that that's basically where we are now uh the nation state is dissolving it's a creation of Renaissance rationalism Electronic media is ret tribalizm the world pharmacology is throwing open a vast Cornucopia of psychoactive substances and uh the legacy of psychoanalysis Modern Art quantum physics and phenomenology have propelled us to the brink of a a Neo archaic understanding of our world and now it has to become more explicit I mean I don't think there's much chance of survival without a major effort to reestablish archaic Styles and institutions and it's not an easy thing to do I mean if you're idealizing 70 naked people with no physical culture who are following along behind their cattle on the plains of Africa and you want to take their social institution psychology philosophy and aesthetic lay it onto a global electronic culture of 7 billion you're going to have to there's going to be some creative twisting and turning in all of that nevertheless I believe it can be done now there's one more aspect of this that I want to touch on that's sort of philosophical in general and that is we've talked about the Psychedelic experience we've talked about how it dissolves boundaries and changes cultural values and so forth but what we haven't talked about is what is it exactly I mean what's so great about it if you read it description of a psychedelic experience it sounds sort of like uh well everything dissolves you see a lot of bright colors you have funny ideas and then you have to rest for a day well what is so great about that I mean why should that be a cultural culturally transforming issue well I I believe that that we misperceive the Psychedelic substances if we simply think of them as an inert substance in a plant which when taken by a human being dissolves programming and shows you the basement of your mind essentially that isn't what's going on I believe here is much closer to what's going on psychedelics convey information the other kind of chemicals in nature that we're familiar with that convey information aside from DNA are pheromones pheromones are aromatic compounds released by plants and animals usually to carry a message within in the species so ants as you know lay down chemical trails that other ants sense and can follow well uh in a sense halogens are are inees pheromones of some sort they carry information across species lines and uh the kind of information that they carry the message is one of Harmony balance and uh integration and so a human population with a with a psychedelic institution or Sacrament will in its pristine form tend to be nomadic have very little physical cultural expression uh tend to have a very loose family structure an extended family structure in child rearing uh Arrangement and I believe that this is where we can introduce the concept of the Guan mind the reason the Psychedelic experience is so Paradigm shattering is because we believe that we are alone in Intelligence on this planet and what the psychedelics show is no there is a much larger field of Mind than we ever could suspect in our ordinary State of Consciousness nature herself is a minded entity and information is Flowing between species between biosystems across biota gradients of light chemical release water so forth and so all of nature is a vast communicating mind of some sort and the only portion of that vast system that is out of alignment is the human world because we we closed the channel we closed the channel by abandoning the shamanic institutions in many many human languages the word shaman means go between go between well go between what and what is the question well the answer is go between the safe pedestrian assumptions of an organized society and the vast churning ocean of mystery that is real being and every society is an illusion reared against the mystery of real being and pursued in ignorance of it so the psych the the shaman mediates between these two worlds The Ordinary World people have to live in in order to catch fish and have children and form relationships and bury the dead and another unseen Dynamic world of energy of process of U strange attractors of the great unknown but it isn't an abstraction it's nature and history is the consequence of an animal species losing its connection to the guy in mind and instead of then a Guan agenda integration Unity cooperation you get an ego agenda dominance resource extraction territorial acquisition control of other human beings and resources so when Shamanism died when hallucinogens became stigmatized when the climate changed we literally fell into history we became a different kind of animal and the consequences of UN tramel historicity being practiced for 12,000 years is to bring us to our present situation where we have immense intellectual understanding of some aspect of nature we have an immense ability to coordinate uh group activity in certain areas like building a bridge but not disarming for example uh but we have no ability whatsoever to control this darker self that sort of Drew itself up to the campfire 12,000 years and said you know you have you banished me into the darkness for a million years while you lived in a psilocybon driven Paradise but here I am again and the piper must be paid now all the cards are on the table and it's up to us we who live on this planet at the end of the of the 20th century to try and do something with these facts if we go extinct if we wreck the planet and toxify the environment it will be a tremendous tragedy because there are ways out there are answers but how much of the baggage we've accumulated over the past 4,000 years are we going to be able to take with us into that new world bloody little I maintain our music our mathematics our dance our theater uh I don't think our Technologies are going to be able to come with us unless they go through serious downsizing and uh detoxification uh so really the discovery in the 19th and 20th Century of these ancient ways of relating to plants it's not just a curiosity of anthropology or an exciting subfield of Botany it is in fact very Central to the human drama of our Salvation because I don't think we can fix ourselves through rhetoric if we could fix ourselves through rhetoric then Buddha and Christ would have done the job uh we can only fix ourselves by consciously analyzing our dilemma and then intervening and I believe these uh cultures that have existed in a kind of suspended animation in the rainforests of the world while Western European civilization charged through its merry Adventure the the uh rais and Detra for the existence of those Aboriginal civilizations is that they carry the archaic nosis it's all still intact for maybe 30 or 40 more years if we act quickly the material is there the techniques are there uh it can be saved but it has to be brought into modern civilization and so you know classes like this well I I guess it's important to talk about toxicity this is an issue and drugs what you have to understand is all substances are potentially toxic you can kill yourself with water if you will drink enough of it uh in the case of drugs the toxicity usually lies much closer to the effective dose than it does with water uh pharmacologists have a concept called ld50 which is a horrifying idea but you should know it ld50 is if you have a 100 rats and you give them a drug the ld50 dose is the dose at which half the rats die and what you want in a drug whether it's a psychoactive drug or a cancer drug or anything what you want is a drug where the effective dose is me many many times lower than the ld50 Now by that standard LSD is the safest drug there is because you can feel 50 micrograms of LSD and 200 micrograms of LSD is quite a full menu but to but to kill yourself with LSD nobody knows how much it would take the ld50 for LSD has never been determined it's so high that's good news now uh psilocybin is a mid-range in this way of classification the effective dose of psilocybin is 15 to 30 migam a fatal dose of psilocybin is around 150 millgram per kilogram of body weight so you can figure out what that is that's thousands of times or several thousand times the effective go well then something like masculine the LD 50 is only about 40 times the effective dose but so and by that measurement then you would have to say masculine is a rather toxic compound and it is in fact uh you have to take 700 mgram this is the other another way of talking about toxicity how much do you have to take uh if you masculine you have to take 700 mgram that's damn near a triple z cap filled with pure alkaloid LSD uh to 100 micro gr you can lose it on the head of a pin easily so that's that's another way of thinking about the uh toxicity and Effectiveness just and then there's one other parameter how long does the drug last if you if you take a substance and 48 hours later you still have your phone turned off and you're lying around in warm baths and wishing for a massage then you took a toxic substance it's not supposed to do that to you it's not supposed to leave you with backaches and insult and a wreck well by that criteria then DMT must be uh one of the safest drugs there are because it carries you to a titanically psychedelic state of mind and returns you in under 10 minutes to the Baseline of Consciousness uh now it takes 70 milligrams of of DMP to do that uh so then that's you know it takes a lot more than it does LSD now interestingly and then I'll let you go to lunch we ran a little over so we'll go to 12:30 here's some new data that you may not have uh a new psychoactive plant has come onto the scene with a new psychoactive substance in it previously unknown to science in a chemical family previously unknown to contain psychoactive compounds and this new compound can justly claim though very little is known about it at the moment and the experience itself is absolutely White Knuckle terrifying uh can claim to be the safest psychedelic in the world because it only takes um 1,000 microgram 1 millgram of this substance now remember it took 70 milligrams of LSD one mill or 50 to 70 1 millgram of salvinorin alpha smoked will deliver you into a freakishly alien reality for about 15 minutes and then you will return and we know almost nothing about this drug at this point we don't know it's ld50 but it's the only the second compound ever discovered that is active in in the microgram range it is an isoquinoline it is in a chemical family unknown to contain psychoactive drugs they've all been alkaloids or or or tropanes or something like that suddenly late in the game here is a plant you can get high on the plant although you have to work at it and it's not dramatic it's like the first half hour of iasa or something but if you isolate this compound and smoke it it'll turn you every Way but Loose um and this is new data that has just come out it should Inspire those of you who are field botanists or ethnographers there is a vast number of plants in the literature that are listed as suspect tacens what that means is somebody said or some Indian told some Bist we take this and we see things at night or something uh Salvia do was known for 20 years but nobody could find the compound and nobody could get off on it well now people are getting off and the compound has been discovered and they're looking at near relatives of salvia dorm including a Ukrainian mint and some Kus species and we're finding in n in microgram and smaller amounts a whole family of these new psychedelic isoquinolines and what they will mean for us it's hard to say I mean previously DMT held all honor for uh you know weirdness the depth of the of the call as heiger likes to say uh now salvinorin Alpa is uh is on stage and there's lots of work to be done I mean I think it's fairly logic it seems reasonable to say that first of all you don't want to insult the physical brain in in any time anyhow because you only have one or two so uh you have to keep care of your brain uh the it's very interesting that the most dramatic hogen and now I'm talking about DMT let's leave salvor and Alpha out of this because not enough is known about but the most powerful henen actually occurs in human metabolism every single one of us as we sit here is elaborating DMT in tiny amounts we're also elaborating five hydroxy tryptamine or serotonin in quite extensive amount so I believe that iasa from this stand of judgment is probably among the safest of the hallucinogens because it's essentially brain soup there's nothing in it that you don't already have in your brain it's just got more of it and in a different proportion oh yes they occur in the in the pineal gland six Adeno six Adeno glumer tropane is actually um five hydroxy tryptamine six hydroxy tryptamine uh so a lot of these compounds are elaborated in the brain LSD is not uh salvinorin Alpha is not ketamine is not mesculin close but not I mean there are amphetamine like compounds in normal metabolism but that isn't one of them yeah seems to me that the best model is like a Target or a bullseye the the the various substances exhibit more and more of their unique character the more you take in other words if you take a low dose of something that's psychedelic it will uh clarify your vision stimulate you and then and you can't really tell whether you've taken cocy and LSD masculine or or what have you as the dose increases the specific characteristics of these substances begin to emerge and often they're contra-intuitive to a chemical way of thinking for example iasa and uh mushrooms psilocybin is for phosphor oxy and and diyl tryptamine when you remove the phosphorus Group which happens as it crosses the blood brain barrier you get something very much like DMT however when you take psilocybin you don't get something like a DMT trip uh you you get uh in the case of psilocybin the most startling um quality of it is that it speaks it speaks in English it it tells you things I mean this sounds Preposterous unless you've had the experience it sounded Preposterous to me for years I just could not imagine what my friends meant when they said these plants talk to you until I had a conversation with it uh so psilocybin speaks and it's a kind of a it's a kind of a spocking kind of message it's about enormous machines in orbit around alien planets it's about galarian Destiny and the history of the local cluster over the last half billion years and it it's an enormous scale and it's about races worlds Technologies civilizations on and on and on switch over to iasa which is chemically almost the same animal and it's about the waters it's about birth death femininity uh health and disease uh relationships energy flows between people it's very human it's very feminine it's very organic and uh uh enclosing well these are quite different messages I mean if you had one in the absence of the other you would have an unbalanced view I think of what is going on however then if you take these things and push them all do double doses or triple doses I'm not recommending this but I'm just saying it has been done and we have the data what begins to happen is everything migrates toward the DMT Flash the DMP flash seems to be sort of like the center of the bullseye now I haven't personally had enough guts to smoke salvinorin Alpha I've watched people do it and if you're going to do it I suggest you don't watch people do it because I was gung-ho till then uh but assuming it lies somewhere on this spectrum what seems to be happening is all of these things Propel you toward deeper and deeper per states of boundary dissolution at the first level you simply dissolve the boundary between yourself and the part of yourself you don't want to look at that's called dealing with your stuff at the next level you dissolve the boundary between yourself and other people and this is the bonding situations and that sort of thing at the next level uh boundary between yourself and uh your memories of the past all of your experience is returned to you and beyond that you dissolve then into what you call the collective unconscious or something like that and then beyond that Guan mind Cosmic mind I mean I'm no fan of these hierarchies of named uh hypothetized spiritual entities but that's the basic idea and finally and astonishingly you know I think the elf Workshop of the DMP flash lies very close to the center of uh of the experience of of what is possible it it is not simply as you might have gotten the idea from reading the literature you see in the 60s they wanted to map it over Buddhism or or Eastern religion and they wanted to say that as the dose increases somehow Satori or shunyata or Nirvana or the white light or the great void or something like that I never had that experience as I raised the dose the complexity of the state complexified it never simplified it never became neoplatonic it always it just it became borian and you know the universe is full of a number of things so I I don't think we can you know some this is maybe time to stop but I'm reluctant to connect this entire Enterprise to what is popularly called spiritual growth I just think it's more like about growth and spirit implies some weird anti-materialist bias or something like that uh this you know I was TR Catholic so to me spirituality means do you visit the sick and imprisoned do you clothe the naked do you feed the hungry do you bury the dead do you comfort The Afflicted this is what's that when I see somebody doing those things I say this is a spiritually evolving person when I see somebody taking psilocybin I say there is an Explorer but I don't try to lay on some moral judgment about Good and Evil I think that's that's inappropriate uh um spiritual accomplishment is manifested by moral action and uh the role these psychedelics play is they may make moral action easier because they show you your memories and your depths and your mistakes but intrinsically they are not tools for Spiritual Development they are tools for the exploration of mind and we don't know what that is and we probably won't figure it out this afternoon but anyhow we'll come back here and since it's now 12:30 let's come back at 2:00 uh I think if you're stupid there's just no hope you know you you have been Afflicted with a terrible circumstance and you have to struggle with that uh you know a lot of people took LSD in the 60s and it seemed to have no effect whatsoever on them I mean you know a lot of pretty colors and this and that and then they went out to be War planners and corporate Executives and and so forth uh I I think it's very important to talk about and analyze your experience there is no communication even within the confines of your own mind if you can't describe what's going on and so you know it's the idea here is not that you should take psilocybin day in and day out or week in and week out but that when you do it you should do it with dedication and attention and pre-planning and you while it's happening you must pay attention and after it's over you must analyze it you you must understand it you must try it it's a tool for thought it's a tool for understanding and uh it as far as education is concerned you know I think one of the reasons I keep coming back to CIS is because unspoken in what's going on here is the idea that modern Psychotherapy of the transpersonal sort is an embryon kind of Neo archaic Shamanism and there is something to be said for judicious use of the concept of the guide uh I I think that the guide should first of all be very psychedelically experienced a therapist who has never taken these substances can't guide you because they've never been there uh but in the presence of a skilled therapist all kinds of progress in dealing with personal issues and complexes can be made people say this stuff is Escapist but nobody who's ever taken it will line up behind that it's too difficult I mean I've had people say to me I've heard people refer to psilocybin as silly cybin and said I've never had a bad trip on psilocybin and I think to myself gee I wish I were you uh because I don't think the goal with this stuff is to get through it without ever having a bad moment sort of unscathed with the parental seal of approval stamped across your chest uh the goal is to learn and learning is often painful and the most important lessons are often the most painful me if you're going to have to drop an attitude or a way of relating to somebody or an opinion about yourself or something the these things are painful and often you don't just say on the at the height of the Psychedelic oh I see I should change my mind no often there's tears and soul searching and then a sense of dawning light and then the conversion uh this is this is not easy work to do it's not easy for anybody to do it challenges your humanness no matter where you start to out from so you have to bring something to it but if you bring something to it it will work for you and I'm of the opinion and I get a lot of flack from this and you're perfectly free to pile on that uh many other spiritual techniques of advancement don't work even if you are intelligent dedic ated attentive they just don't work or they didn't work for me that's all I can say uh this this will work and if you bring sincerity and integrity to it it will respond Beyond Your Wildest Dream I'm an alienated intellectual probably most of you are as well uh I may have been that before I ever reached psychedelics uh basically I think that it almost comes down to practice in a noisy form of aesthetic criticism of the society if something is stupid you should say so and if something is tasteless or brutal or insulting or demeaning we just have to say so now the problem is there is so much that is tasteless insulting and demeaning but you would spend your entire time uh doing that well isn't that what the cult the countercultural milu is I think it's a group of people who to greater or lesser degrees are entirely uncomfortable with the official culture and then try to embody an alternative culture and it's a culture of Tolerance of uh uh broad-mindedness of uh immediate experience it's not a work ethic culture it's not a pile up wealth kind of culture it's a culture that lives in the moment I mean uh and to my mind what we can do is be more adamantly counterculture Cal and creative that's why I'm so happy to see something like Rave and house and ambient music Come Along because you know rock and roll which was previously the the sustaining thing of the counterculture was totally co-opted and uh and the counter the cult the official culture turns all criticism into a fashion statement that seems to be how it operate so in terms of embodiment I think what we have to do is be creative at lunch I was saying you know the culture the crisis that we're in as a planetary Society is a culture of Consciousness there ain't enough of it that's what happens when when women are raped in Bosnia that's a failure of Consciousness that's what happens when rivers are polluted with DDT it's a failure of Consciousness a failure to correctly appreciate cause and effect and if there is anything which increases our Consciousness I don't care if it's a religion a food a drug a sexual product a magazine if there is anything which increases our Consciousness we should find out what it is and get with it and once you've increased your Consciousness a little a lot some uh it's not doing any good then unless it is embodied and the way it's embodied I think is by pushing the art pedal to the floor it's the only pedal which we have been allowed to touch we don't get to touch the uh uh International Investment profile pedal or the international diplomacy pedal those are all reserved for the Masters uh but artart has been seeded to us and art can either be fawning and psychopatic or it can be radical and challenging or it can be uh transcendental and inspiring and I think what we've accepted in the Arts in the last 20 years is the idea of immense fragmentation and personal expression th this is exactly the wrong thing because what that is is ego we don't care what Jeff Coons thinks about the person he's sleeping with and all this other stuff this is just self-indulgent nonsense the idea that art should save humanity is very out of fashion in the cynical 90s but I believe it and I believe and I believe that the technologists who are working at our elbows are giving us tools more powerful than we or our critics ever imagined could exist and if we use those tools uh for the explicit purpose of creating a new cultural agenda uh it it it will be done you know we're all a little confused about this but those folks over on the extreme right wing the pth buchanans of this world they know exactly what's going on and they call it cultural war and while they're moving up their tanks and digging foxholes what are we doing you know wandering around asking what's happening uh cultural war is very real and the they the the people who are you know I realized sometime in the last 48 hours that when fascism comes to America it will be called traditionalism that seems to be how it's going to present itself so uh I think art is our great uh our great Ace right now the most exciting cultural Frontier uh to my mind on this planet uh is the internet and the worldwide web and that is a beast which escaped from the control of the Dominator institutions it was built to wage thermonuclear war and to be indestructible well when thermal nuclear war ceased to be a hot option the indestructibility of it remained and now it can't be turned off it can't be controlled it can't be regulated and look who's on there I mean guys with long hair and girls with short hair and this drives the Masters crazy uh so I look at the internet as a a vast canvas and to which we are each invited to make our own contribution and if if we seed 3D to the Orthodox culture then we should make cyberspace our own um one of the things that I I didn't stress enough this morning was uh the visual Acuity uh empowered by psilocybin leads to hunting success but the higher doses of psilocybin propel past observation of animal habits and environments and into the imagination and I think you know that the cultural Compass of this species points toward the imagination that's where we're going to live in the future uh that's what we were born for that's where we are at our best in 3D well as James Joyce says INF finigan way here in moain we flop on the scen side Maine being the red light district of Dublin but up the ENT prospector you sprout all your worth and you wo your wings well up the ENT is spelled these days HTTP colon double backs slash www yak yak yak right in other words the imagination is being turned into a piece of real estate and uh the the faster we can occupy it and give it the the caring boundaryless psychedelic communal tone of our community uh the closer we are then to having a foothold or a grasp of a real solution I remember once I was at some impass in my personal life and I decided I should take a psychedelic and pose a question you know they sometimes say you should pose a question and I had never done that so the question was am I doing the right thing about my life and well the answer came back what kind of a chicken question is that to ask a galarian int Ence well I suppose that was the answer I needed to hear it put my problems in perspective I realized you know you don't ask Freud to clip your fingernail for God's sake uh so in that sense I'm not sure about intention but the the way I understand intention is that you should very conscientiously control set and setting going into it uh don't take these things things in crowded noisy socially complex environments on an empty stomach with people you don't know that this is definitely a bad strategy to follow uh and it's you know going damping your ass off in a noisy environment is the perfect strategy for clearing your system of a drug I mean that if you take a drug you don't like what do you do you go outside and chop a uh wood for 3 hours and then you feel much better better because you physically uh worked it off the way I like to do these things is uh in silent Darkness on an empty stomach at high at at strong to Stronger doses not recklessly high doses but what I call effective doses uh alone and this last thing just seems to throw people this alone it tells me what a triple Scorpio I must be that so many people are absolutely horrified of the idea of taking a psychedelic alone when I wouldn't it would you'd have to twist my arm to get me to take it with someone because if I take it with someone it's inevitably going to be about them and and I may not want that much of them in my life you know even if I take it with someone and they never say a word and we both lie side by side not touching I Don't Drift deeply into my trip I find myself listening are they breathing I can't hear them breathing but now so maybe they're dead but maybe they maybe I just can't hear them so if I disturb them that's not cool on the other hand if they're dying and as a courtesy I like and then my mind just you know it it just goes into a tizzy well maybe you're not as neurotic as I am but uh yeah do you all understand what he's referring to by the Rockette type model he's referring to a person a psychiatrist uh Salvador roet who's operated in Mexico for years I've never met him so correct me if I'm not doing it justice but as I understand it this is basically the assault theory of psychedelics where you give people first of all you give them multiple substances uh it may be LSD it may be LSD with ketamine it may a lot of substances and then a lot of input it can be music but I've heard of cases where he took a a group of of Jewish Housewives from Long Island and showed them Holocaust footage well that kind well it depends on what you're after here I mean if you're trying to break people down this sounds like it would break me down I would not know how I could even survive something like that uh but I think my theory is almost exactly the opposite I say there should be very little input I don't think you need to go out and buy a lily tank for your basement but as close to that as you can get is good in other words I lie on a bed silent darkness and look at the back of your eyelids with the expectation of seeing something it took me years to be able to articulate this because I thought everybody did this but apparently not I once talked to Roland Fischer the guy I mentioned this morning uh he'd given psilocybin to 2500 grad students he'd taken it 20 times himself and I said I said well Rolland what what do you make of these hallucinations of these volleys of visual hallucination and he said I never close my eyes I was floored I mean that is so antithetical to my instincts with the stuff that I couldn't even imagine it then your question about Guru abuse I I don't know what it is in me uh I guess just deep cynicism I discussed this once with the mushroom and what I was told was simply this for one human being to assume that they could attain enlightenment M from another human being is like a grain of sand on the beach assuming that it can attain Enlightenment from another grain of sand on the beach in other words all grains of sand are alike didn't you know that and all people in this particular area are alike how many gurus have to be caught with their hand in the cookie jar or the nookie jar or whatever it is before you get the message they are just like us and that may be granted them a level of moral sophistication they lack as a class what I truly believe is nobody knows anything the more generous position is you know well the Buddhists have a piece of the action and the Mormons know something and everybody has a piece of the action the mushroom says nobody has a piece of the action that no one knows anything and that's tremendously liberating and it carries a responsibility for you to take yourself seriously you have no other source everything else is going to be here St secondhand rumor Thrice told your self is your instrument for the exploration of these Dimensions uh there is spread through the world a lot of what I call and I hate the gender bias in calling it this but it would be dishonest to change it I I call it wise old man woman Wise Old Man knowledge it could be wise old woman knowledge there's a lot of this all over the world if you go to Asia you will see men sitting in doorways at evening smoking their pipes and watching the sunset as their grandchildren play at their feet it's a safe bet this person never took LSD or soen and yet they've attained a certain kind of uh existential validity wisdom comfort with the phenomenon of their own being and that can be taught and handed down and talked about and inculcated and cultivated but this psychedelic thing is something uh very different I don't I don't think anyone can lead because I don't think anyone is in a position to lead if you counter by saying what am I doing I'm pointing toward an Open Door that's all the the method and the material is what you need to take away from this weekend the opinions of Terence McKenna are simply that and worth just that much but if you take the technique and the materials you can create your own world of of meaning and and coherence yeah how many gr five if you weigh 145 PBS five dried grams weigh it this is the other thing people uh don't weigh their doses they eyeball it well the ego in a frantic effort to save itself has an amazing ability to under to overestimate the weight of mushrooms uh when you when you actually show somebody five dried grams lying on a plate they usually pale visibly at the very thought that that's what you're talking about I think the sincerest form of religious worship is an act of understanding that the Universe wants to be understood by its Creations there is a need for dialogue so uh when you take psychedelics the way I think of it is once you get past the personal stuff then the model for the Psychedelic Voyager that I use is the fisherman for ideas ideas are the proof of the pudding and so you put your little boat out on the sea of mind and let down your nets and what you're hoping for is that minnow don't swim through the net minnow are ideas that have a certain striking peculiarity but are utterly ultimately unsatisfying uh an example would be to spend much time meditating on why your little finger just fits your nostril uh you know it's an interesting Insight but you can't build on that much I think uh and if you have and if an idea is too large it'll Rend your nets and you won't be able to wrestle it into the boat and in fact you and your nets and your boat will be dragged into the ocean and we just put you in a corner somewhere and look in on you once a week uh so what you want is Middle IED ideas and they can be any idea counts it can be an idea for how to reorganize an investment plan or how what quantum physics is really trying to say or you know the structure of cytochrome C it's a specific problem with an answer and uh I really believe that salvation is an act of understanding that the moral life is a precondition for salvation but that the final step is an act of of understanding so I take seriously the idea that these things are Consciousness expanding and and that we should use them to add to the storehouse of culturally validated ideas I'm obviously considerably older than you in the 60s we actually did it with fairly High purpose and did it at fairly high doses I mean it you weren't even getting into the game if you didn't take five 00 microgram now people take 70 micrograms and feel that they can hold forth on the subject of what is LSD uh I I think what happened was uh in the 70s and then in the 80s uh the dose was dialed down and it permitted people to take it less seriously and so you didn't take it as a fun thing because you were young you took it as a fun thing because you were young in the 80s and that was how the80s dealt with it you you can dismiss LSD as just kind of a fun thing if you keep the dose down under 100 but once it starts climbing it begins to be more and more profound uh I have noticed as I age and my teer age that we seem to get more sensitive to it not which is not to say that we don't need to take it but that when we do take it we don't need to take quite such flattening amounts as in the old days but uh I I think uh once you are conscious of your identity and of the world you're in sometime around 16 or so then I think it becomes just a matter of circumstance and predilection and intelligence I I don't think you know psychedelics work with intelligence but they can't increase it Beyond a certain point and and some people are just I almost said shallow and then I decided simple and then some people just are Beyond beyond the reach of these things somehow it just doesn't address their agenda what this seems mostly to have an appeal for is uh slightly culturally alienated members of a ruling Elite I where are the black people who should be at this thing where are the Latino people who should be these things are inevitably incredibly white and male um why is that well I'm not sure what I would say is just make sure you are really in nature because the reason I stopped taking LSD outside or psychedelics outside was because every time I would take him something so weird would happen that I just could not stand it usually having to do with another person usually a stranger I mean you can go up to the top of Mount Whitney look around make sure nobody is there drop and within 15 minutes some the ranger wants to see the the camping permit the Army is doing helicopter maneuvers 30 cup Scouts show up I mean it's it's uncanny so I I and some people like to do that I mean some people's idea of a good time is to take 500 mics of LSD and wander around Lower Manhattan meeting people listen well I think DMT is if DMT didn't exist we would have to invent it sort of there has to be something in the world there has to be a weirdest thing once we have the concept weird there has to be a weirdest thing and DMT is simply it DMT is that thing which above all other things you have convinced yourself doesn't exist it's the one thing you are certain is impossible uh that's how it seemed to me uh it it complet completely deconstructs reality in a completely unexpected way in other words reality can come apart many different ways and if it begins to come apart you hope it will begin to move along some traditionally sanctioned spiritual Arc you know toward Jesus or Heaven or Hell or something identifiable what happens with DMT is there's an eruption of the unexpected it is seems to be in its nature to be unexpected and it seems to carry the message with Incredible intensity that everything you know about reality is wrong it isn't what you think it is uh when you smoke DMT when I smoke DMT and according to Rick Stan's research out at New Mexico when most people are exposed to DMT very quickly like within 30 seconds to a minute you are conveyed into an inconceivably alien and dramatic environment of 100% hallucination nothing you have ever seen before is there there is nothing there that the English language can describe because there is nothing there that any English speaking person ever has encountered before or German or French or Swahili you you are conveyed into not a unitary world not the white light the one or any of that but a un a complex multiplic world of motion light color depth interaction and none of it makes very much sense at all it's metaphor for what I'm talking about is imagine that you were a Paleolithic person uh getting loaded around a campfire somewhere on the grasslands of Africa and imagine that for a minute and a half you suddenly found yourself standing in Time Square at rush hour well you could sort of make sense of it I mean when you came back you would say well there were people sort of there were sort of people and then there was a lot of motion and then there was a lot of verticality and uh and but basically you're just thrashing and clawing the air in front of your companions they are not getting a picture of Time Square at rush hour from this description DMP is like that it seems to punch through to an impossible World a parallel Dimension and it's not as it it would be shocking enough if it were purely incomprehensible the problem is it's not quite purely incomprehensible there's a 2% residuum that you seem to be able to relate to these self dribbling basketball like entities that I call ties that come bounding up and leap into your body and crawl all over you and jump in and out of your chest cavity uh they are singing in some kind of language that you don't hear but see and so they're singing objects into existence some kind of musical grammar is condensing small pieces of furniture around you and you have to remember 30 seconds before you were in some shabby apartment you and your strange friends fiddling with some drug and now that's all gone and and you're you're not sleepy you're not dazed you're absolutely who you were that's the strange thing DMT doesn't affect the part that we call ourselves say I am who I was I'm exactly who I was but what the hell has happen to reality and it's been entirely replaced by something that I never saw any science fiction film never heard about in any fairy tale never dreamed of never hinted of and now I'm fully there and these little entities are dancing around attention and then they want you to do something they want you to sing objects into existence with your voice and they're doing it they're showing you how it's done they somehow grammar is seen in that world it's as though a switch has been thrown in your neurophysiological machinery and language which you used to hear you now see and these things are putting a lot of pressure on you saying do it do it don't don't question don't think don't reflect just do it and I sort of feel something across between heartburn and Satori begin to move its way up my chest and when it comes when it reaches my mouth my mouth flies open and this glossia like linguistic stuff begins to happen which is like language like liquid like Silk uh I can see it and it's colored and it's complicated and now I do not understand what this is for I can join you in speculating it looks to me like first of all language itself is a mysterious activity a behavior which we partic on God on the on the body of nature human language is the place to look it is not anticipated in other forms of animal organization and in US it reaches this excruciating level of expression and with it we have created culture which is a virtual reality that we surround ourselves with not only of ideologies Marxism democracy monarchy but buildings highways infrastructure so it's almost as though uh language is an alien artifact of some sort you remember Bill burough said it's a virus from outer space well this is sort of like that idea but language is obviously not something that is a finished Enterprise and I think that we are approaching either through our own the Natural Evolution of the Soma of the body or through technology or through some combination of the two we're approaching a place where we're going to switch channels and switch the language channel into a more Broadband with mode and we're going to see what we mean instead of hear what we mean that the convention of using Smallmouth noises to symbolically indicate objects in the world so that those who share the same set of linguistic assumptions can download this acoustical Babble and reconstruct the thought out of it is going to be traded in for something more like a direct acoustical hologram where then ambiguity is much less prevalent you know uh if I read you a a paragraph from PR we can spend the rest of the afternoon discussing what did the author mean you've all been in those situations what did the author mean but if I show you a sculpture by branzi we just walk around and look at it it self-evidently is what it is it does not have the ambiguity that adheres to written and spoken language and I think this ambiguity has allowed misunderstanding and misunderstanding has allowed pain and Agony so it may be that we are on the brink of a higher form of language The Descent of the logos this this would be it the manifestation of the logos and the psychedelics by allowing a look through the hyperspatial window at Future states of human organization as I argued this morning is actually giving us a taste of a human future that may be far in the future in the same way that if you had smoked EMT 20,000 years ago you might have landed in Time Square circa 1960 uh it's an insight into a future development in the physiology and mind of man and makes it very suggestive then that DMT is being elaborated in our brains as part of normal metabolism we have genes that produce DMT well what if those genes were to be switched on in a more dramatic way uh then what would the quality of culture be if culture is the serotonin trip then what kind of culture would we live in if the serotonin were backed out in favor of a DMT maintained neural substrate let me tell you a story which seems to me really a strange story but it happened to me so I'll tell it uh when I first started growing mushrooms I was taking I was testing all these batches and taking it quite a bit of the time and one evening I got locked into this voice thing and it was singing a little song and the song was something like this says says it ended each line with the word says so I thought interesting then I went back and listened to Maria sabina's uh mushroom bada where she's singing in sville which is a mountain Indian language of central Mexico she's singing in sville and the and the Interlinear translation is right there on the page this word means says in C T so I thought aha this thing is can can do it in any language well you know mercil OD in his great book on Shamanism he subtitled it the archaic techniques of ecstasy what a shaman is in command of are techniques and they're not based on his personality that's where it's different from the guru if once the shaman has told you his techniques he's told you all he can tell you and you then have to apply the techniques the ideology is fairly absent in Shamanism at a practical level uh it's it's basically about experience not about an ideological preconception of things the way I handle gurus is just to Simply say what can you show me and then if you're told well you have to sweep up around the ashram here 12 years or so and do daily prostrations and then we'll cut you in on the good you just just can pick up your napsack and keep going uh because real the real stuff is not hidden like that uh when I went to South America and people said I said what can you show me and they said well let's just sharpen our machetes and go out here into the woods a half a mile and cut some Vine and bring it back and boil it up and I'll show you what I'll show you I'm very suspicious of lineages and secret knowledge and situations where somebody decides where somebody else is worthy to Ascend to the next level because you know man for man and woman for woman there doesn't seem to be a a more scheming todry and venal subclass on this planet than gurus I mean there may be some good ones but my God they keep Bad Company obviously the world is a unity and it arrives at the surface of your body as a Unity of electromagnetic vibrations and light and so forth but your your senses break it up at that point your eyes tell you about light that's a certain range of electromagnetic radiation your ears measure pressure waves in the air the acoustical range uh your your hands inform you about the tactility of the world but the world is one thing so it's almost as though the senses are reunified in synesthesia in a way that may have been originally intended and has for some reason fallen out of our physiological repertoire or perhaps exists as a future state but yes tasting shapes seeing colors uh feeling music uh there are people who have unusual neurological conditions who live in these kinds of spaces and very hard to some of you may know um the guy who wrote Oliver sack's book The Man Who mistook his wife for a hat It's a Wonderful book man shap and the man who tastes it shapes that's right what's the story on your book yes I'm a little embarrassed by it because it it breaks my proletarian mold uh there were only 70 copies of that book and it costs about $1500 and what it is is it's a showcase for an artist named Tim Eli who is very famous in the world of made books and he's at the top of the made books thing so I contributed a text he made the paper and the binding and set the print and painted on each page of each book in a special unique way and it's a it's an art Mar uh object well I don't Advocate if you're not at least a third or fourth year biochemist you shouldn't attempted because it involve in the laboratory because it involves the use of Liah uh here's a book called psychedelic Shamanism that has recipes but Liah is lithium aluminum hydride is very explosive and don't make a fuel of yourself the other approach is to try to find a a weak Source in nature and concentrate it and uh uh feris grasses feris tuberosa arendi you can grow them and do a a low Tech water extraction I'm not sure no has ever handed me a gram of DMT created by these techniques this is all sort of backyard Theory but in theory it should be able to do that there's also a plant called desanta sanis that grows in the midwest that has a very high concentration of DMT in the root bark it's an interesting to talk about that plant for a moment because it's only been known that it contained DMT in the root bark for about 5 years but it could have been used by the North American PLS Indians to produce uh uh some kind of shamanic cinogen but never was as far as we can tell and this is an interesting question those of you who may be going on to ethnography or something like that why do some people use halogens and not others it simply isn't a matter of availability for example second only to the Mexican concentration of species in Waka and the Sierra maitea is the concentration of over 35 known species in the Pacific Northwest yet evidence of use of those mushrooms by the the um pling shim sham and the northwest coast Indian is very hard to come by ranging from maybe none to maybe a little tiny bit but by no means is it established that they did this uh this desmanthus thing is another thing uh why was it never utilized uh this new chemical and plant that I talked about this morning has an interesting uh relationship to all this Salvia dorum uh this Mexican mint that contains salvinorin Alpha it's used only by two fairly small language groups the thil and the toal but and and they call it ohas de la Pastor the leaves of the shepherd dis but when you ask them well what do you call it in uh In Sail what do you call it in your language they say we have no name for this plant in our language well that's impossible if they've been using it for any length of time at all it seems to suggest and they say that this is a new plant but what's puzzling about that is it's known from nowhere else on Earth so is it that these people discovered this plant as recently maybe as 50 or 60 years ago and having a tradition of plant use they inculcated this one into it there's a similar case in Africa you probably all know about ioka tabern anoga which is the um the only really major African alkaloid containing plant uh and it's the basis of a religion in Gabon and Zer called bti and interesting on this gender issue just as in aside this stuff is used to hold relationships together it's well understood that that's what it's for it's to bond people but and these people who use it the Fang people they say they got it from the pygmies but what's strange about iboga is there is no record of anybody using it before 1870 anywhere this is very puzzling because the Portuguese had been into West Africa since the 1440s and trading and buying slaves and bringing back U artifacts and this sort of thing no record of iboga use before 1860 uh so we can't assume always that these things are ancient there's a lot of controversy about peyote peyote uh if you're not looked into the matter you might assume this is this ancient hogen uh but in fact the most of the evidence argues that until uh the 1880s Sephora sukunda Folia beans were the preferred shamanic intoxicant of the Ragan drainage well now today sephor cund foia is considered a poison it has cytosine in it it's a terrible thing to take this is another thing I mean as long as I'm just riffing on these things you you have to realize that intoxication is a culturally um defined situation uh for example uh in in Madagascar the malagi Republic the large island of uh Eastern Africa there are no major psychedelics but there are what are called ordeal poisons well these are plants where you take it you think you're going to die you beg to die and then you get better and are fine well uh people come out of that reborn rededicated to their families and their professions and their position in society why not because it was psychedelic but because a near-death experience is intrinsically uh an experience which causes you to reexamine and re-evaluate your relationships to the world and other people my my friend rert sheldrake he he says when you really die when you are Beyond any returning DMT floods the dying brain and the only way you can have that experience without dying is to artificially induce it uh this may be so I mean one of the most challenging things about DMT and we might as well you know it's the afternoon of the first day so we might as well dig into it what about these entities that I talked about what about the types the self transforming machine Nails the jeweled geometric basketballs are we to just dismiss this as as hallucination we whose lives are built on hallucination or or or what is to be made of that what kind of an entity can have a mind but not a body and be loose inside your mind uh I I think that possibly I mean this is sort of the most woo woo place will pass through unless you bait me but if if you ask Shaman worldwide how do you do what you do they will say well we we use ancestor Spirits the ancestor Spirits help us well you know you may think you're countercultural but most people hearing about ancestor Spirits are able to dumb that down into oh these naive Charming Indians you know that sort of thing but what if there is actually something which survives bodily death that is actually continues to exist in a dimension which we would have to call mental or or transreal and what if you can come and go from that Dimension using shamanic techniques well that is in fact what Shamanism has always claimed to anyone who would listen they say you know through the the shaman passes back and forth through the same doorway through which the dead pass but they do not return the Superhuman condition of the shaman his or her ability to cure to handle fire to drive metal objects through flesh uh all of this is to show that they are of Both Worlds that they they partake in the onos of normal being but they also partake in the anos of transcendental being and I think it would be the most astonishing cultural development of the last 500 years if we were to actually learn something about the after death that would strip away our materialist and cheerful assumptions that when you go into the ground you're nothing but compost in a way that belief has been the permission for all of our dumbing down and devaluing of ourselves our society each other and the planet the the belief that well ultimately it doesn't amount to anything anyway well what if ultimately you don't know what you're talking about then you have to come to terms with that this metaphor that I tried to put out this morning about how the shaman goes to hyperspace and therefore can see next week's weather next week's hunting who's going to recover from illness and who isn't it what going into the fourth dimension means is all time becomes co-present you know there's that piece of dogo poetry I dreamed I saw eternity the other night an endless Golden Ring in other words eternity is all time in a completed form and uh I I think you know timelessness stopping the world as cast said this is an indication that you have truly crossed the boundary out of three-dimensional Newtonian space and into this hyperspatial Dimension um I really I can't say enough about this because I think this is the key uh that life is a process that conquers dimensionality it always has been the earliest forms of life were fixed slimes they had no motility they had an existence as points uh later they acquired motility the ability to swim around and we're aware then of the concept here and there and then really the entire evolution of Life on this planet is simply to develop better organs for moving around in three dimensional space stronger legs stronger arms better binocular vision so forth and so on until you get to human beings and we invent language and what is language it's a strategy for escaping from the narrowness of the present moment because if you have language you can say I remember the time so and so or you can say why don't we plan on doing so and so in other words you es and when you get written language then you get history then there is in a way the past never goes away the past changes into history and in that for or the present changes into history and in that form it stays with us and now culture electronic culture we dream of an information lossless Society where no information is lost and then that means in a sense where no time passes away you know we'll have Marilyn with us and JF okay everybody a kind of Eternity uh so uh and so language is then seen as a a strategy for the further uh overcoming of dimensional limitation and now with the internet about to go Visual and and all that it seems like we're again about to take another step deeper into the conquest of dimensionality but there's nothing new in all this this is the business that biology has been about since day one my technique or my intellectual style though it may not seem like it is to always seek for a rational explanation first and then if then from there more and more exotic explanation so I was really flored by the this tiik thing because that seemed to me unambiguously not something which was supposed to happen in the universe as I was told that that there were supposed to be small non-human intelligences leaping in and out of my uh chess and one idea that's occurred to me and since some of you are interested in Psychology it's may be worth talking about plus we get to inject a buzzword here which is as you know it is now understood that we are really not one person we have many personalities a multiple personality disorder is simply when you Manifest this on a level that irritates other people a multiple personality order is when you have them all lined up in a row and the right ones always talk to the same people and so the illusion is maintained well in the same way that you know if you had a big mirror you look in the mirror and you see a reflection of yourself but now if you lift the mirror up and bring it down on the ground and shatter it what you see now is not a shattered reflection of yourself but hundreds of little reflections of yourself each one whole well may it not be then that what DMT does is it shatters the illusion of the self and says you're not a self you're a tribe of cells and here they are dancing performing singing uh they they are the fractal adumbrations of the personality that was the buzz word that I wanted to get in they are the fractal adumbrations of personality that's one possibility the other possibility Souls like I said an Ecology of soul Souls that is the conservative explanation why is it the conservative explanation well because we are here and so if we think of them as human beings of some sort they just happen to be dead human beings nevertheless we see that there are human beings so perhaps there is a residuum that survives death and that is what these things are other possibilities must range more further a field a parallel Continuum actually inhabited by these things that they are not human beings in any form but they are autonomous entities with their own universe that's one possibility another possibility is um that these are the long sought extraterrestrials that they don't come in brillium ships the size of Manhattan to take control of our gross industrial output that that's a crazy way of thinking about extraterrestrials that they come through a technology of mind that they come uh by collapsing face across MEAP parex and appearing in the mind as a hallucinogenic experience but then of course the question is why and why this sense of familiarity and why this deep affection and concern for suffering Humanity uh I don't have answers but uh I know that these questions need to be answered the domain is real well let's take two of the possibilities if it's an Ecology of souls we're dealing with then there should be they should have complete knowledge of the history of the planet and everything that's ever gone on and so forth but they won't have a complete Encyclopedia of Galactic history or something like that uh I I think that well frankly I don't know what I think it depends on how recently I've smoked DMT uh the overwhelming impression is of cognitive dissonance occasioned by the simultaneous perception of alienness and familiarity these are the most alien things you've ever seen and you know you've been here before and you know it's very important and you know it's basic to who you are but if it's the self then what have we done to the definition of the self the self is supposed to mean that which is most familiar to me if the concept self can also include the notion that which is least familiar to me then it's almost too broad the concept to to use I I think what we need is scientists meaning you don't have to wear a white coat that you do have to have the scientific attitude rolling up their sleeves and going in there with the same attitude that Wallace went to the Amazon and that Darwin went to the Galapagos and let's figure out let's map the Flora and Fauna let's get a taxonomy of these types let's try and figure out uh where they're coming from and what their purpose is uh I Shamanism I believe is the study of this Dimension and it's not reached any conclusion at this point it is a phenomenology not a science and so the Amazon Shaman he has a language of control and description which is satisfying in his context and to his people but it may not be satisfying in your context and to your people even if you assimilate it perfectly no it's like physicists talk about uh uh charm and strangeness of quarks but this has nothing to do with strangeness or charm in ordinary speech these are very very complicated Concepts where the technical gloss has been to call it strangeness and when a shaman tells you he deals with ancestor Spirits you for whom Casper the Friendly Ghost is the image of an ancestor Spirit definitely get a cocka maming notion then when you try and map Casper the Friendly Ghost onto the Amazon Shaman's notion of an ancestor Spirit these Concepts require a lifetime of manipulation and familiarity before you understand where the the the boundaries will lie well why don't we take a 5 minute 10 minute break here and then we'll come back