without further ado i want you to welcome ethnobotanist shamanologist and visionary terence mckenna applause from audience well, its a pleasure to be in southern california, and in clare mont addressing the jung society before we get into the main body of all this i will personally introduce myself to some of those who may not know me I started out my academic career as an art historian with a major in ancient languages and that took me to asia and sort of disillusioned me with traditional spiritual approaches in the asian style and i reconnected then with my childhood love of nature and pretty much abandoned the humanities and went into the sciences but by then it was to late to become a real scientist and i was too tainted by my time again among the poets and the artists so i had to become a very soft hard scientist so i got a degree in conservation of natural resources, about as soft of sciences as you'll ever hope to touch and i did a lot of traveling around looking for a viable vibrant numinous approach to spiritual reality and the only place i found it was uh in the amazon basin, where as you know there are extremely archaic groups of people people who never submitted themselves to the historical process, the way, the peoples of the middle east and europe did and there there flourished through the use of chemically complex plants, techniques and traditions for accessing a world invisible to the rest of us a world of forces and information that is uh transhumance, supernatural, if the word means anything, but this um, this supernatural dimension is uh anchored in the plants that live in our world and my brother was a botanist and i had botanical training as we studied the psychoactive plants of the world, especially the new world tropics where they seem to be concentrated we were simultaneously exalted by the realization that we had found a doorway a real doorway into hyperspace and at the same time tremendously upset and alarmed by the fact that this doorway is in the process of being dismantled by the forces of human ignorance that are not even aware of its existence so, uh, this was the impulse behind the disision on the part of my partner cat and i, that these plants must be saved, they must be preserved in germplams ropistories or botanical gardens or something like that toward a day when they can be studied and the uh power the dimensions within them can be given their real weight so to this end we founded a botanical garden in hawaii that is specifically dedicated to preserving plants with a history of shamanic importance, and i mention this because this is the real world political world that we do and everything else that i will say today will be barely anchored in a world familiar to most of us but there is a political anchoring there is a place where it all comes tangential to the world bank and the IMF and the host governments and so forth and so on it is tremendously important to preserve this shamanic option if for no other reason then we do not know what it is we do not know uh what it is well uh so at the break if you come up our news letter of the botanical garden is the large stack of beige paper and there are 300 copies of that so i hope theres enough for everyone we do exist on donations so if any of you are philanthropists we can certainly tell you how to spend your money, we have many plans for your money okay um i wasn't kidding about what an honor i think it is to address the jung society at one point in my life my greatest desire was to become a jungian analyst and i had the good fortune of coming upon jung very young i was about 15 when a very precotious friend of mine brought psychology and alchemy in the karuahbane translation i think it had just been brought up we were stunned and we read it from cover to cover and then went on to mysterion discontinionase ion the studies and the phenomenologies of the self i said to someone yesterday we read all the books of jung that the jungians never read they seem to stop up there at the front of the line with the archetypes of the collective unconscious and the personality type-but to my mind it was the late stuff that was fascinating and i uh am slightly puzzled and we were talking about it last night at the distance between the jungian community and the psychedelic community - because they seem to me the unschooled observer to be definitely sharing the same concerns and strangely enough they share much of the same history and geography bosal was of course junks home town, it was albert hoffmans home town did one half of town know what the other half was doing (audience laughter) i'm not sure, um that the relationship to jung to the unconscious - to the collective unconscious as it's discoverer has been always somewhat puzzling to me because of course if you know the history of 20th century art you know that da da which was the great prefigurative movement for surrealism rose in zuorich so you know we got LSD 0 the schools of modern art that laid great stress on the irrational and the great schools of psychology that extended the boundaries of the unconscious, all rappelling around in these little swiss towns. and it's interesting to imagine conversations or meetings that might have taken place when people slightly left there ordinary habits and wandered into bars they didn't know and drank with people they never met before because jung provided maps of the unconscious and at 16 when we were beginning to experiment with this and let me stress this was before the great social waves of LSD taking of the 1960s just preceding that from about 1963-65 we were frantic for maps of the unconscious and fried was useless i meant he notion that the contents of the psychedelic experience could be reduced to what fried called day residues and repressed sexual desire - didn't wash within 10-minutes you could tell that was not a serviceable metaphor jung on the other hand offered a vast uh pantheon of uh gods and archetypes and psychic complexes forgotten or abandoned i mean i thought of jung basically as what i call a noetic archeologist, someone who goes with toothbrush and nutpick to dig away the detritus from the bones of vanished idea systems and if any of you have read the complete - the works of jung in the bulling set you know that the richness of it all is in the footnotes i mean her was a man who raised the footnote to a high art and who was aware f a literature to my mind that no one seemed to know about that junks references reach a thousand years deep into the past with great density of reference this is where i learned about mechrobius and dosephius and dionysus the pseudo areopica and all those other folks that you just never hear about it was my introduction to the underbelly of western civilization was through jung uh and to my mind - now i'll fiend this in to todays theme - i think maria mentioned that jung did not have a lot to say about shamanism he came to it late in his life and he had already worked through the massive the exojesus of the symbol systems of the europena mind and so she was sort of content to indicate shamanism as an area where more work was to be done and then the great follow on scholar who was mercialiode who then actually studied shamanism showed what it's archetypal underpinnings were in all times and places the combination of jung and illiad i think pretty much delivered us as firm map of the psychy as dependable a map of the psychic geography as we can expect to have until we make the trip ourselves and uh readjust the landscape with our own notes and uh observations for jung the great path into the unconscious was alchemy and alchemy is an interesting pivotal domain because i think we could in a way say it lies halfway between the concerns of an archaic cshamanisma dn halfway between the concerns of a quasi scientific psychedelic attempt to explore consciousness merciliode wrote a brilliant book on alchemy called the forge and the crucible which is the bridge to show you how you go from jungian psychology into an understanding of alchemy that approximates illiad. the notion for the alchemists that jung brought forth very strongly - 13:00 was the idea of projection of psychic contents, projective of the active imagination onto processes and uh objects in the exterior world in the case of the alchemist it was the swirling chemical processes in the elembix in their alchemical vessels that they projected the uh the uh the great round of the archetypes onto these chemical processes they saw crystalization, sublimation separation a statements about the contents of the psyched as much as about statements about the exterior world because for them the firm division between mind and matter the firm ontological division between mind and matter that is built into western thinking now did not exist that comes with renae decart with the invention of whats called the resextensia - the extended world and the resbaren - the interior world which has no spacial dimension so for the alchemist mind and matter were two terms who's e exclusivity could be blurred under certain circumstances and the terms of one could migrate toward the other well now we as moderns - ordinarily only experience this state when we are intoxicated by hallucinogenic drugs or when we are in a state of severe psychic weakness, when there is then overwhelming from the unconscious that is not uh not with the permission with the ego as what happens with the psychedelic experience all these various ways of approaching the psyched seem fairly abstract and bloodless and removed from daily existence unless the psychedelic experience is present and it vivifies these metaphors it makes clear what these perennial traditions are uh talking about so what i thought i would try todo today - and you're welcome to steer it other directions in the question and answer period is the workshop is sacred plants as guides uh a lot of information has to be imparted if were going to satisfy my patagogical urge here because i would really like to leave you with information that you didn't have before some of which may have practical efficacy in your own life so in thinking about this very large issue: sacred plants as guides i basically break it down into three categories for ease of handling in a context like this and they are a kind of survey what how many plants are they what are the chemicals that drive them and what is their geographical distribution in other words what are the botanical facts of the matter and then uh secondly i think that in order to understand what these things for spiritual growth and psychic development you have to place them in a context and the context is chronological and historical has these things always been around have shamans always been taking them how do they relate to the synthetic drugs that have been developed in the last couple of centuries so the history of our relationship to the pharmacologically induced ecstasy and then finally and probably we'll get to this this afternoon the phenomenology of the experience and the techniques for achieving and controlling it because this is a practical - there is a practicum here this is not a course in mongolian philology or something like that the ultimate idea is to get those who feel called to the task sufficiently informed and psychically empowered that they can push off into the oceans of mind and the interior with some fair amount of confidence that they'll return to the port with all hands (audience laughter) so lets start with the survey then and lets talk about what the options are and this will be sort of unstructured and conversational with forays into other areas first of all the striking uh thing when you want to study psychoactive drugs and plant and their impact on human culture - and thats really what interests me - is how drugs effect culture - after went through jung and iliad my net port of call was mcluan and i have soared very deeply the notion that media structure civilizations in ways that the civilizations are never aware of and jung of course talked about print and manuscript and electroniculture he did not talk about drugs but drugs are a form of media because they - information travels through the drug to the mind - thats a medium of communications and various societies where drugs like clothing with no awareness of their existence at all, someway in the way that a fish relates to water - so that frances if you're in dublin you are swimming in the ambiance of an alcohol culture - you don't have to be drunk to be in dublin although it helps but the entire society is premised on the possibility x2 in india the entire society is premised on the possibilitiy of uh hasheesh intoxicants and social morays building design uh everything takes account of this - cultures don't see this - we do not think of ourselves as a meat sugar alcohol culture - people do not walk around saying "oh wow i'm so high on meat, alcohol and sugar, i can hardly stand it" but they are and certain consequences flow from that so as i make my way through this survey you need to bear in mind that a culture takes its tone its clothing from the drugs that it emits, and you can know a great deal about a culture from the drugs it excludes, the drugs that it excoriates and fears because various drugs exentuate the suppressed different parts of the psychy so these are statements about anxiety about various parts of the psychy the striking thing when you set out to do a survey like this is that you discover that our culture - the culture of europe for most of us some of us are black some of us are asian but largely the roots of american culture lie in europe this is the most pharmacologically poverished culture on the entire planet it has the longest history of disconnection from any kind of ecstatic intoxication and the cultural forms of earope linear abstract narcissistic and promoting of male dominance are to my mind exactly what you would expect in a culture long deprived of the boundary ddesolving numinous encounter with the vegetable mind so um a lot of the culture problems we are dealing with are based on the fact that we as europeans have no place for drugs we don't really know quite what todo with that as you move south from europe into the content of human origins : africa you discover that well africa supports a tropical ecosystem which because that means increased speciation of plants you would think indicate an increased number of hallucinogens africa is surprising poor in hallucinogens this is not well understood as we go through this survey i will make reference to numerous unsolved mysteries in the field and i always try todo this because I'm hoping their are graduate students listening and they are looking for research topics and there are numerous research areas where important work can be done one of them is this question of poverty of hallucinogens in africa - why does it have todo with the extreme length of time that africa has been subject to human impact because afirca is species poor generally for a tropical continent however in the interest of thoroughness there is one hallucinogenic drug complex that should be mentioned because it raises issues that are important for the broader context and that is ibogaine or tabernantha iboga the so called bedee cults of zyarre and gabon now this is the psychedelic about which we in the west probably know the least it has spawned no waves of social histeria it has not been the subject of padromes or uh media freakout and its a powerful hallucinogen and its not only a powerful hallucinogen but it has a component of sexual excitation which is ansylary and unusual, if you have actually ever looked into the chick of aphrodisiacs uh that genital chaining and prolonged direction but a true aphrodisiac a chemical that would impel you to want to have sex there is nothing quite like that except this tabernantha iboga is very interesting we tend to think of an aphrodisiac because we tend to break our heart away from our genitals as a kind of uh cold thing i think but when you talk to these people who are taking ibogaine they don't talk about aphrodisiac they say this causes open heartedness one heartedness they call it and one heartedness is what they are striving for in the boety colt and they achieve it and it allows them to resist cultural incursions by christian missionaries bowery is the main cultural force that is holding back conversion to christianity by these people, fang culture the people who are using this ibogaine it's an interesting culture its a great deal of anxiety in fang culture about divorce because in relationships between men and women divorce is very easily maintained in the fang but it's always followed by extremely lengthy and protracted negotiations with the family of the divorced partner about the return of dowry and a huge amount of neurosis and agony and murder and violence goes on over these dowry return negotiations, the ebogaine stands right in the middle of this as a source of one-heartedness making divorce less likely so it's a very important as a force for social cohesion and i mention this because when we reach ayawausca i mean when we reach south america we will see ayawausca not as a type of aphrodisiac or a thing to unify couples but as a kind of telepathic pharamon that unifies whole small tribal groups together into a one hearted one minded modality and if we get into a discussion about the possible evolutionary impact of hallucinogens we'll see that it always lies in the direction of these collectivized states of mind and uh dissolution of boundaries between people other than tabernanthea eboga africas hallucinogens are trivial and i won't mention them in the time we have cannabis is in africa as well but cannabis is worldwide now and probably has been for quite some time cannabis is a special case chemically and culturally we tend to think of cannabis as a recreational drug but thats because in the 20th century we always smoke our cannabis in the 18th and 19th century cannabis was eaten and jelly forms of cannabis that were eaten judging by the pros of people like _ _ _ _ and people like that it was as powerful as LSD without doubt i mean these people were being swept into titanically alien dimensions well when we cross form afirca to india india interestingly of course all of you know tremendous depth of at least concern with the spiritual dimension if not realization of it thats a tougher call uh india would be a likely place to look for indigenous hallucinogenic plant cults because of the spiritual obsession that characterizes indian thought when we look at the historical foundations of indian thought we find that it all rests on a group of texts composed between 4500 and 2000 years ago called the vedas and the vedas are nothing less than the worlds longest continuing advertisement for a hallucinogenic plant. the problem is we don't know what this plant is this is the mysterious soma of the rig vedas and uh mandala 9 of the rig veda is an entirely a hymn to soma soma held hinduism of the vedic phase together later it was repressed and again graduate students pay attention one of the very interesting problems to be looked at by sociologists social psychologists and anthropologists is how if a drug once discovered or a plant once discovered is so wonderful how can these things ever be lost or forgotten and yet in several instances we deal with literatures which sing the praises of some plant or drug, the identity of which we can't figure out or it becomes a very big arm restle between various competing schools of scholarship we do not to this day know what soma was gordon was son who some of you may know the discoverer the modern discoverer of the mushroom cults of mexico founder of the science of enthnomicology believed to his dying breath that soma was amanita mascara the red topped white speckled amanita um this is a mushroom which has a major role in tungustik and arctic shamanism but to say as was son did that this is the supreme entheogen is not supported by the evidence was sons own efforts to become intoxicated on amanita muscaria were not succesfull uh my efforts have not been successful occasionally you will hear anecdotal evidence - someone will tell a story about eating amanita muscaria and obviously they had a staggering breakthrough - a rupturing of plane as mercioliode in his wonderful phrase but its extremely undependable and when you look at the botany of the amanita muscaria you discover that its chemical constituency is seasonally variant genreically variant uh geographically variant and so forth often i think as we gain a understanding of a given shamanism we will see that it depended on an extremely deep local knowledge and if you take what a yakut shaman says about the amanita muscaria and attempt to apply it in the national forests of new mexico you could end up with a tag on your toe uh these things this kind of information doesn't travel well there are old shamans and bold shamans but there are no old bold shaman in looking at the indian subcontinent for other hallucinogens that may have made a contribution the obvious one to my mind is straferious cubensis that which mushroom that grows in the dung of cows and the book that my brother and i wrote was about other possibilities some of you may know their are a family of the argerea family of morning glories an asian family of morning glories distributed from india to micronesia thirteen species all containing psychoactive ergot alkaloids none with a history of human usage now this is another area which really fascinates me why do some plants become discovered by human beings and become the objects of cults which last millennia and others are never discovered at all in societies absolutely obsessed with spiritual advancement this argeraea nervosa is the perfect example because you take the seeds the seeds are the active part and you don't need much of this thing you need four or five seeds less than a table spoon of plant material which i would bet would make it pure unit volume probably one of the most powerful hallucinogens in nature and uh the hallucinations are absolutely stunning and nobody has ever claimed this its free for the taking this means you can cut a deal with an a lie that doesn't belong to the hindus the mayans or the somebody else its an unoccupied parking space ni uh hyperspace and its very interesting that the discoveries are continuous just a year ago some phido chemists in the midwest discovered a new a plant its always been there no ones really taken it very seriously, treated it like a weed desmenthus elenoyensus the elony bundle weed this is suggested that its called bundle weed because a medicine bundle is of course a shamans mojo bag so bundle weed 6% by dry weight nn dimethyltryptamine - the largest concentration of dmt in any plant and unclaimed by native people - unknown to the folk medicine of the north american indians as far as we can tell well so this is very interesting uh continuing our survey since we're now somewhere on the eurasia continent we should mention uh uh pavisoanaphorum the opium poppy with cannabis this is probably the oldest human narcotic minoan civilization was entirely based on opium, on the use of opium - 36:00 and in fact when michael ventrist translated the tablets the linear bee tablets they got these tallies and they thought at first that the symbol for opium must be the symbol for wheat because the tallies were so huge of the things being moved and sold and then when they sorted out they realized no that for the last 1000 years of it's existence the minoan civilization drifted deeper and deeper into an opium narcosis that was its way i think of emephastising the pain of the death of this last outpost of the goddess religion because thats what it was it was a cultural inachronism while asian minor had gone over to god king city states and bronze tipped spears the people of minoan creet had kept the old old archaic religion that came out of africa and then in the last gasp of that minoan culture those mysteries were handed on to the main land of greece and became the mysteries at eleusis and uh and other cult sites it was said by the commentators contemporary commentators of the hellinistic world the site the rights practiced in secret at eleusis are practiced in public at kinosis and this was the difference the going underground of the old proto-minoan mother religion uh in modern times we have a horror of opium uh i mean people are amazed that i even mention it in the same breath but it doesn't hurt to remind ourselves that this verilantly addicted substance opium was not even noticed to be addictive by anybody until 1627 when the english physician john play fare for the first time commentated that opium once taken over a long period of time then there would be a requirement that it be taken throughout life uh um we're right in a middle of the drug war at the moment and it's interesting in that context to notice how the goals of drug wars can change 100 years ago the british navy was involved in what is called the opium wars in china very few people in the modern world have botherd to inform themselves to find out that the opium wars were about the right of the british government to deal opium the emperor of china did not want opium dealt in the ports of china and the british government used canon to enforce their desire to sell opium in the ports of china why were the english trying to sell opium in the ports of china because the tea trade had collapsed from overproduction they stuck with all these tea ships they had created a whole global infrastructure for the sale of tea when the market fell out on tea they just turned to opium they grew it in goa and they sold it in china this was government policy less than a hundred and twenty years ago ok well moving on then from eurasia and I'm sure I'm missing different things but if missed your favorite thing bring it up in the question period to the north american continent and the north american continent - is uh i almost said similarly cursed like europe but thats just my prejudice the north american content is similarly poor in hallucinogens uh there are no very interesting hallucinogens in north america and north american indians and north american culture did not avail itself of this ecstatic plant induced shamanism it tended more to go for whats called ordeal shamanism the sun dance thing where you hang yourself by your pectorals on hooks and stuff like that i mean there are other ways to attain these visions you see but that absence of good hallucinogens in north america just reinforced that whole bear and woolen and uptight thing that came from europe uh the only major hallucinogen to have a role in native american culture is of course peyote and many people without informing themselves imagine that peyote is something which goes millennia into the past and this is absolutely not true peyote use may well be less than a thousand years old among native americans when you go back into the old graves and the very old sites in the rio grande valley in the south you don't find peyote what you find are the beans of sephoris condefolia you all probably know this plant although you may not know it's name its the plant that produces the very hard red and black bean that they can string if you all know what corellanus are these era thrinas which are related to these things ok that stuff contains cytosine and sistinethis is these are what are called ordeal poisons and it might be worthwhile to just talk for a minute about ordeal poisons i said theres more than one way to skin a cat theres more than one way to have this experience to shove your through to an awareness of the numinous thats what we're trying todo is have an awareness of the numinous well in a certain part of the world where hallucinogens were not present in the biome people concentrated on ordeal poisons and what an ordeal poison is its a chemical compound that you take it and you think you're going to die and you beg for death and you do not die you get better you're fine and you're so damn glad to be alive that you undergo an abreaction you get straight you shed some of your complexes and you turn over a new leaf is uh is what it is in madagascar these ordeal poisons have been brought to a high state of perfection also in malayia theres a poison complex that replaces a hullainogencic drug complex and these are horrific poisons so uh what apparently was going on in the rio grande valley was after centuries of this sephoris secundofolia cult someone discovered peyote and said my god thank god and the other the other plant which was big in the southern california northern mexico and across the southwest were the tropane containing deturas the so called tulax religion of southern california where these are deliriant confusants that are unless you have a psychic constitution that is not like mine you can't take these things they're too i just found them confusing it was like a kind of madness and also physically very difficult to handle i experimented i had a phase with these things when i was in nepal because there are sadhus in the catnandu valley who swear by this stuff and if you're in catmanda you may notice in the gutter - well you'll notice plenty in the gutter but you may also notice these detura pods empty detura pods and i noticed them and started asking questions and then out at the kings game preserve past pashupatina i found a bunch of these things and layer in a supply but it is an occult watery- its a dimension of confusion not a dimension of high awareness and i think some of you have heard me tell the story about the reason i gave it up was an english men a friend of mine who lived in this little village in nepal where i lived he was also experimenting with this stuff and one day i was buying potatoes and tomatoes in the market and i ran into him and we started having a conversation and in the course of the conversation he revealed that he believed we were in his apartment - and then i knew we were losing hold on our grounding uh so i don't recommend that i don't have a whole lot to say about it apparently its a thing for magic power magic and i've never been particularly interested in that because I'm afraid of it I'm uh I'm a watcher i like to look i like to get very close to it and watch it but I'm not into grabbing it or doing anything with it i have a feeling that would lead to a catastrophe for me personally uh ok where are we now northern mexico now we've gone all around we started in europe we went down into africa crossed the eurosia continent north america north mexico - now things get interesting because as you leave the senorra uplands and go south in the sierra mazatecka there is this mushroom complex which valentina and gordon wasson discovered in the 1953s 17-22 species - it depends on who's counting of extremely endemic meaning very localized species of mushrooms all producing psilocybin coincident with the mayan the cultural side of the mayan miztechan and mazatechan civilizations and this is psilocybe an extraordinarily powerful visionary and benign hallucinogenic metabolite once the was sons had nailed down this mexican mushroom complex then people started checking and they discovered these mushrooms or con specific species in many localities uh two that are worth mentioning are the pacific northwest oregon washington and british columbia which appears to be the world center for species density of the psilocybin gene and strangely enough very good ethnographic research turns up no hint that these quacutal shimsham clinget and other people had any hint of this they lived in the center of the psilocybin distribution complex and as far as we can tell their shamanism which was highly evolved never discovered or made use of this not so these civilizations of mesoamerica the other places where these mushrooms have been discovered is europe the tragedy of the european civilization is that the logos was apparently there all the time uh uh the english countryside i understand is now practically a scene of annual mushroom runs that are not unlike the lemming runs of scandinavia and everyone poors out to collect the semilenciata mushrooms i've been told i haven't been to these sites but i've been told that uh ionia where the book of keels was composed and where uh saint columba went is covered with mushrooms its very clearly a mushroom ecology attention graduate art students the tracing of mushroom motifs in european art and civilization and culture is an extremely rich untapped field if you need some clues uh look at family escutcheons look at family crests uh in france and the italian parts of france the morel lie family has the morrell on their eschuchen there are other mushroom families and mushroom names so uh there may have been this may have been the struggle between paganism and christianity may have revolved around a mushroom we know druids were into plants we know they were into oak groves but uh the plant that is always mentioned that is the druidic psychedelic psychic plant of choice is mistletoe but mistletoe is chemically very disappointing and i wonder if mistletoe ~ 50:00 is not, it wasn't the plant they wanted to symbolize they wanted to symbolize a symbiosis of one plant up on another its that the mistletoe symbolizes epithetic existence uh anyways this is an untapped area once you get into the new world tropics then you are in the great domain of the hallucinogenic plants and no one knows why it is that the tropics of the new world are tremendously rich in hallucinogens i mean idk how many of you are botanists or or biologists but try to imagine uh figuring out a set of evolutionary constraints that were operating on one side of the planet but not on the other you know when we take for instance the jungles of southern columbia and compare them lets say with the jungles of new guinea these are both continental floras both equatorial both climaxed at a species rich climax and one has dozens of hallucinogens in it and the other has none none uh this is not well understood theories range as wildly as obviously that must be where the flying saucer landed and uh (laughter) thats where the genes were seeded i confess I'm not sure why it is at first i thought it had todo with extremely primitive state so called primitive extremely archaic state of culture in the south american jungle that they represent a real stone age culture where when you go into indonesia it may look primitive to you but the dutch were there before the english arrived in north america it is it has had centuries and centuries for in which these things could be forgotten but then here come the botanists who care nothing for ethnographic data and who simply carry out plant surveys and chemical analysis of plants they can't find these hallucinogens either in the tropics of mess america and the equatorial tropics of the new world theres a vast panoply of hallucinogens not only in the mushroom complex but then also this ayahuasca or yahey complex that we've referred to several times uh this is a huge jungle fine and as we cross into the yahey area we also cross an interesting barrier because we move from plants single plants which are hallucinogenic ally active into the realm of preparations we're on the threshold of the concept drug here because what ayawausca is is uh two plants which are not active unless brought into combination with each other one plant contains a monoaminoxidase inhibitor and the other plant contains dmt which would be destroyed in the gut if taken orally unless it were taken orally in the presence of an MAO inhibitor this was not understood by western pharmacology until 1956 but it was understood by amazonian shamans millennia ago so they bring these two things together and by varying the ratio between the plant containing the beta carbines that inhibit MAO and the plants that contain DMT they can't intensify or de emphasize the vision well most of the hallucinogens in the amazon basin run on tryptomine of some sort usually dmt in the upper basin of columbia ecuador peru like that you get these banasteri these yahey ayawasca beverages these are things you drink and then it comes on this outlandish trip as you go down into the lower basin the banasterri opsis cult gives way to these snuff cults ebena and neopo depending on the languages these don't depend on an mao inhibitor ffor their activity because they're absorbed through the sub nasal mucosa which is an extremely effective way for getting drugs uh into the system the problem with that complex the snuff complex we are such delicate and wimpy people that we cant stand that route of drug administration because what they do is they toast these seeds of anadanantha peragreen this huge leguminous tree which is the source of the seed they toast these seeds and powder them so what you get is a kinda ruff cross between sawdust and charcoal and then they have a hollow tube about this long and they load it up with this stuff and you squat down and put the tube into your nostril and your friend, your friend (laughter) not you because you would not do it hard enough (laughter your friend takes a huge breath of air and pshhhh its just like being hit in the face by a two by four and you fall over backwards you scream and you salivate and you squirm around there in the dirt for a minute or two and then you sit back up and by that time the tube has been loaded for the other nostril (laughter) and your eyes your sinuses can't believe whats happened to you (laughter) so you have to sort out this whole sinus shock which is going on in parallel with then an evolving strange state of mind which is beginning to take over and clarify everything and then there are numerous minor variations on these things uh might talk just a little bit about the chemistry of these things and the chemistry of hallucinogens generally my attitude toward thesee uh this question of plants compounds drugs should these things be used for spiritual growth if the answers no then it finishes it doenst go anywhere IF THE ANSWER IS MAYBE OR YES THEN OTHER QUESTIONs ARRISE WHICH COMPOUNDS OUT OF THIS whole SURVEY and at what frequency and at what dosage and under what circumstances and over the years I've sort of evolved a three way test that i will share with you because i think its operationally maybe the most useful thing you'll hear this weekend and that is if you are contemplating some compound some plant the first thing to ask yourself is does it occur in nature does it have some tangenentialty to what is already existing because obviously hat exists thats nature has undergone some vast winnowing process out of the set of all things which might exist in that wonderful phrase of alfred north whiteheads certain things have undergone the formality of actually occurring (laughter) you know and they and so certain compounds have undergone the formality of actually occurring in the biological matrix and so they should be our pool out of which our experimental compounds should be drawn but this is thousands of compounds how can we further narrow it well an excellent way of narrowing it further is to ask the question of this compound does it have a history of human usage does it have a history of human usage that is your uh FDA approval because if you can point to a tribe of people who have been taking this plant or mushroom for millennia and they don't have miscarriages tumors cataracts blindness downsyndrom 8 fingers on the left hand or whatever it is then you can be fail confident that this thing is benign that these people have observed its action on pregnant women the elderly those with you know and that it has passed that test then finally the narrowest gate through which a compound has to go to intersect my precious body is it has to have an affinity to ordinary brain chemistry it has to have an affinity to ordinary brain chemistry we don't want to launch something on your brain that it can't recognize at all that it has no biosynthetic pathways to degrade that his no receptors for just some crazy thing you know 5 amino 3 triothyfinthioimaxodine we don't want that its not the spirit that we're acting in here so if the compound can get through those three barriers then its an excellent candidate for providing spiritual gain at low physiological uh impact well now some people may say oh well you've taken all of the fun out of it all the good things have been tossed aside in this mad rush to purity not at all the very best stuff was retained in this process because uh in terms of relative strength and bizarreness of effect and so forth the strangest the most powerful the most transformity of all hallucinogens in nature or out is dimthyltryptamine DMT and uh it's worth talking about DMT for a moment because it will raise certain issues and distinctions that you may not have been aware of because DMT is hands down the most powerful of all hallucinogens i mean it is so powerful that whatever is in second place is lost over the horizon yet yet it is the most benign of all hallucinogens because it occurs as an endogenous neurotransmitter in the normal human brain we every single one of us at this moment have nn dimethyltryptamine being synthesized activated and degraded in our synaptic membrane so this is almost a paradox the most benign of all hallucinogens, the most fast acting i should also add is also the most harmless, the easiest to take it's sort of removed, it sort of puts a certain obligation on the experient because there is no reason to hold back except that there is this question does it drive you made? and then the more serious version of that question what about the possibility of death by astonishment (laughter) this is no joke, death by astonishment is probably the major risk we run (laughter) uh with this stuff, because the impact of the breakthrough is uh is so total, so complete, so unexpected and in a way this sort of brings me back around to my theme because I encounter DMT LSD all of these things in that very period when i was getting set to take flight as a jungian analyst and what completely blew my mind about DMT and uh I mention it again, here is an opportunity for research is how trans ehres a horretical construction how trans-archetypal the content of the flash seemed i was appalled because not only had i a certain amount of interesting jung and proclivity along those lines but my original major had been art history art historians what we're trained todo is to be able to look at a motif and say oh yes i'm familiar with this from ceramic from second millennia peru and also mendian embroarderary work we know motifs we're trained to recognize and connect disparate aesthetic domains when i smoke dmt and came down i said you know this is not on the map i can't believe it, this doesn't connect to anything how can there be domains of the human mind that do not announce themselves in folklore fairytales dreams or mandala painting that are so removed from the van of what is human that they are apparently not except able in structuring our maps of ourself and our psychy and that for me was the contact with what i call an i didn't call it it this rudolph auto called it this and this term influenced jung auto preceded jung was, it is the holy other. and if there is an archetype of a holly other then there, this is it but perhaps the holy other transcends the archetypes this may explain to some degree interest in gnosticism especially the valentinian school of gnosticism that there is a higher and hidden father, all god, who is outside the machinery of cosmic fate and it seemed to me that in those extremely profound dmt flashes i was actually witnessing a domain outside the machinery of the archetypes which is for us as moderns; thats what machinery of fate is it's not zodiacal machinery it's hard wiring in our psychology and our genes that gives us our fate well so having said that uh i've not only made the the survey but also brought us to by ending with dmt - the subject matter of this quest and i wanna make it clear i speak about the power of the psychedelic experience because i think people should be informed of their birthright and i feel very antsy around the notion that someone might go from birth to the grave without ever having a psychedelic experience it makes me as antsy as the notion that somebody might go from birth to the grave without having a sexual experience it's a strange kind of uh protective denial or a kind of expression of fear this is our birthright this is part of what it means to be human these altered states of consciousness i think are pretty much scripted into the existence of women because they, most of them will give birth which is an organically scripted psychedelic experience from which there is no escape unless of course you go for the drug knockout, the spinal and then you miss everything but biologically, physiologically women are set up for uh this experience man are not, it's possible to build such barriers against overwhelming that it never happens in your whole life and i believe that if we psychologically analyze the effects of these uh psychedelics what they do is they dissolve boundaries that's all. i mean, if you interview ten thousand people who've had a psychedelic trip each one has their own herotheny there own heroschomos that unfolded for them but the some total of it is boundaries dissolve and then whatever's on the other side of your boundary comes flooding in to claim you and to reshape and remake your psychic well i see the entire illness of our civilization as an as an ego inflationary illness. we have gone so sick with ego that we are literally murdering the planet rather than confronting the consequences of our psychic imbalance. and uh the psychedelics act to regress this they are almost an inoculation against the ego and I see the ego as uh phenomenon arising in historical time or rather actually history is caused by the ego but the ego is a component of the psychy that arose in the post archaic phase in the post psychedelic phase, uh it's entirely a modern invention it's less than 15 thousand years old and the assumptions of the ego are the source of our neurosis our disequalibrium why did the ego arise? it arose because of the climateologically enforced abandonment of these psychedelic religions of the archaic period in other words here is the scenario as I see it primates, even primitive-even uh non advanced primates like squirrel monkeys, howler monkeys these kind of primates all have male dominance hierarchies the whole thing with primates is about male dominance but a lot of things about human beings mark us as the most unique member of the primate group uh obviously we look different from any other monkeys even the stranger monkeys look more like the normal monkeys than we look like them or look like thus us our upright posture the other thing about us is our suppressed extra cycle we cannot tell at a glance whether a woman is in heat or not and yet obviously that had a tremendous shaping force on the social psychology of uh of the primates I believe everything about us that is noble and worth saving uh occurs against the grain that if we had followed the grain, we would still be uh competing with jackals for the carcasses left by lions of uh large game kills on the plains of africa but when the african continent began to dry up and we were forced out of the trees where we had in an arboreal vegetarian lifestyle we came under great pressure to expand our diet and the - i believe that the great unstudied factor in human evolution and human emergence is the effect of a complex diet on our emerging species and it's not only the presence of hallucinogens such as psilocybin in the in the diet but other things swell. psilocybin is the most spectacular case, and if you came to see darwin you'd hear about evolution and if you can to me you'd have to hear this little theory about human emergence most of you can probably recite it by heart now uh but its a three step its a three step feedback loop from a fairly bright monkey to a fairly stupid human being and uh the way it works is like this these monkeys come down out of the trees they're predating on kills of ovungulate animals made by lions, they're competing with jackals, they're testing all of the foods in the environment and low and behold, in the maneur of these ungulate mammals that are eradeating across the african continent uh there are what are called copperfitic mushrooms and the presence of large amounts of tryptophan in maneur as a substrate means that these copperfitic mushrooms elaborate psilocybin so here in this new grassland environment are the psilocybin mushrooms these protohominid creatures testing foods for their diet would reach the psilocybin and would test it well then this three part feedback loop to humanist then comes into play and it works like this very light doses of psilocybe and so light that you cannot an hour and a half or two hours later tell you've taken anything. you say i don't feel it i feel completely normal i must not have taken enough. that dose, if you would submit yourself to being tested by an optometric analysis we could show you that your vision has improved slightly this is an effect of eating small amounts of psychoactive amines increase visual acuity well o - 1:15:00 you don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that if you're a hunting animal competing in a highly competitive environment and suddenly someone hands you a pair of chemical binoculars you are going to be a more successful hunter than other members of your species who are not availing themselves of this food item so there was reinforcement there aha if we eat these mushrooms in small amounts we will be more successful hunters or maybe it was never raised consciousness as an if than relationship it was just we eat mushrooms we hunt well… kind off thing (laughter) then if you eat slightly more of the psilocybin if you bring slightly more of it into your diet uhhhh it's what's called a CNS stimulator Central Nervous System stimulant an effect of all CNS stimulants is what's called uh arousal and arousal means simply that you can't sit still, you're very restless you're very energetic and often in the male animal you have an erection it's an overall systemic arousal arousal and uh if you if you give if you witness this situation in monkeys monkeys are very hang loose kinda characters and so they just all fall together in a heap and make love uhhh and this uhhh increases what anthropologists and primatologists like to call successful instances of copulation this means that this increase interest in sex in combination with an increase success in obtaining food is creating the perfect situation in which there will be a population boom of these creatures they're eating better, they're enjoying themselves more and they have better relationships with each other so population boom is on the way well then, the next and final level is she you raise the dose higher so you're no longer restless or interested in sex or any other - but you're flattened with the ecstatic folding of the flu numinous hallucinogenic rupture of playing then - and this occurs in the tribal context then there is boundary dissolution uhhh group sexual activity and group bonding and identification and this is where uhhh this telepathic coherence this inner dynamic of cohesion and caring that we see in primitive people to some small degree and that we imagine must once have been our birthright this is where it came to be and at those higher levels of psilocybin most of you probably know language is formed by an organ on one side of the brain called brooches area uhh brochas area the brain being always symmetrically constructed brooches area has a twin on the opposite side of the brain but no one knows whats going on there it's apparently a silent area of the brain well when you take psilocybin there is spontaneous linguistic activity glossolalia - henry munn has written about this in his essay the mushrooms of language it's almost as though psilocybin is a pheromone that promotes linguistic activity an effort to take verbal intentionality and connected up to the ontos of being in some way and then it's almost as though words are born out of you you give birth to words and uh these concrescances of meaning then create a kind of unitarian ambiance which we call understanding lanugage is a miracle i mean make no mistake about it - i don't mean any amount of dissection of monkeys or human cadavers will give you an insight into language language is a behavior of some sort so bizarre, so many orders of magnitude more complex then anything else we do that for all practical purposes, this is the thumb print of god up on creation human language and it's a self transforming thing it keeps bootstrapping itself to higher and higher levels and it creates for us the entire ambience of reality once we had words, we quirky replace reality with them and so i believe that what psilocybin promotes is cognitive activity. the coordination of visual input with plants and strategies for hunting or acquisition or whatever uh it promotes this uh increased arousal, which really in a way_ we as moderns are absolutely as in awe of as our mushroom munching ancestors 25,000 years ago we can't reduce it, we don't know what it is you know jung was always so concerned that people say it's only psychological, it's only the psychy of the news for you it may only be the psychy but the psychy is a lll there is and as we came into a relationship with the mushroom, humanness emerged on the african belt and was able to stabilize itself for a few millennia, and then we fell into history because of climeatological change for many reasons but we literally fell into history and now we operate in this lower domain a domain of limitation of misunderstanding of low grade languages uhh but and we are neurotic we are unhappy we are dysfunctional and i believe this is because our connection to the logos, to the informing voice that gives meaning to being has been broken. over ten thousand years it's fallen away and all we're left with is our spiritual yearnings our nostalgia for paradise and uh our pathologies and miraculously we are left with the time capsule of preservation represented by the rainforest shamanic culture that use hallucinogens there lies our answer but it's like the aura boric serpent taking it's tale in it's mouth the salvation of the super future of the planet lies in a recovery of the values, modalities and religious practices of 25,000-50,000 years ago 1:22:50 Break Break break (applause) we haven't screened the pile so we're just gonna go through them i'll read them aloud normally i give long answers but there's such a stack of questions here i'll try and be general (laughter?) or general breif n ___? since dmt is present in the brain does the introduction of excess dmt shut down the production of natural dmt? in the way that the body stops producing opiates during opiate usage. if so what are the effects? is dmt really so chemically perfectly benign? the firs point to make is that many of your questions cannot be answered because research into these areas is not allowed so often uh we can't answer our question this question, "does the introduction of excess dmt, limit endogenous production?" I can say with fair confidence that that's never been studied my guess would be that it does not, because the dmt is in no sense of the word do you become habituated to dmt. i mean - a person who does dmt want's a year as a fanatically heavy user, i would say. and uh the question; is dmt really so chemically benign?" again this has not been studied as you would study with rats and so forth to determine it but experimentally speaking, the amazing thing about dmt is the speed which you return to normal. You return to the baseline of consciousness in under ten minutes. Well that tell's you that the brain is very well able to deal with this compound. One way of judging how toxic a drug or a plant is, is to ask yourself the question, "how long after i take it do i feel completely normal?" and with dmt you feel completely normal 15 minutes after taking it the shortest recovery time of any uh drug this question is concerning the bundle weed, while it does not correctly meet the criteria of longterm use, is it to be considered safe? i'd say the way to answer that question is to do a chemical analysis of the bundle weed. if theres nothing present but dmt in it, i think it should be considered safe. Now there may be other compounds present. in south america it's possible to contrast two plants - psychotria veridas. which has almost entirely nothing in it except dmt as the portion of it's alkaloid fraction. or uh varola cathaganascens which is used in the making of snuff, and chemically it's a mess. it looks like they swept the floor. you've gone nn dmt, 5meo dmt, alphamenyltryptamine, monomehtlytryptamine, sixhydroxymothyltryptamine - all these this is not what you want you want a surgical strike on the synapse thats what you're going for not splattering all kinds of junk all over the place uh what is the best medium for psiloybe spore germination the best medium is rye malt agar no question about it, go with rye organic rye malt agar extract in todays climate talk about access to shamanic pharmaceuticals for the average person this is the where do i get it question dressed up in respectable terms without being too self serving my brother and i wrote a book about growing mushrooms called psilocybin the magic mushrooms growers guide by otis and i'm ottos as you can see i really believe in growing mushrooms if you are as you sit here not psychically strong enough or balanced enough to take psilocybin then if you learn to grow it, at the end of that process you will be because growing the mushroom teaches you cleanliness, punctuality, attention to detail, uh steadiness all of these virtues which are the very virtues you need to travel smoothly in that dimension other hallucinogens other shamanic hallucinogens that you will find easily available to you without breaking any laws uh the heavenly blue morning glory sold in every seed store and garden store, are not to be taken, do not take them. they have been dipped in a fungicide that will make you sick grow them, and collect your crop and take that and uh this is a major hallucinogen of uh of great antiquity, extremely visionary uhhh the hawaiian wood rose uh you can obtain this from uh people who make dry flower arrangements often have these pay attention, you want the hawaiian baby wood rose if they try to give you something called hawaiian wood rose, a big clunky thing. that is inactive and uh and won't do it umm the deterras are freely available - i do not recommend them. i recommend against them. they're a common landscaping plant in southern california, and the gypsum weed is of course growing out in the desert out around lancaster and other places like that, there are a couple of companies which have very forth rightly decided to sell plants with a history of shamanic involvement i have no stock in these companies, so uh i can recommend them without fear or favoritism one is called , of the jungle up in sabasstical california and the other one is called dream gadens and i think it's here in santa monica both of these groups publish astonishingly complete catalogs of psychoactive and shamancally important plants ok that access without going to the streets and crime and that can you tell us anymore about elenoy bundle weed i just did, umm and that's all really i can tell you about it all these questions are the same question having convinced us of the wonder of DMT, what would be the easiest and quickest way to obtain it how does one acquire DMT (laughter) comment about the supreme court ruling against the use of peyote by north american indians um very bad law obviously, law so bad that the national council of churches, the national jewish affairs committee and some very large catholic organization, all filed briefs protesting this thing and i think that it was actually realized that it was a goof and it will be brought back in the new-you can't bring something back something in court in a hurry because that's unseemly but i would bet within 5-10years this would be overturned because a close reading of this law means that uhhh lying for pesa or communion could be construed as a psychoactive substance and uh the whole thing is just bad law, bad idea exhale has consideration been given to the possibility that in the case of certain plants which are recounted in writings but the identity is unknown that the reason they are unknown is because shamans purposefully kept their identity a secret. perhaps such secrets are still being kept this goes to the question i reaised this morning how can a hallucinogen once discovered ever been lost and i've only been able to figure out one scenario in which this could happen it happens like this uh people discover a wonderful plant that imparts visions or insight or something and everybody takes it and enjoys it and then slowly a hierarchy emerges a professional class, priests, and only they decree, they decree that only they will be allowed to take it and then they lord it over the rest of society with an iron hand and then the rest of the society gets fed up with that and theres a slave revolt and everybody in the ruling class is killed and the sacrament is lost i can't figure any other way that it could happen and the vedic thing, this seems quite reasonable obviously soma was being more and more confined in it's use to a single class and then that class became viewed as obnoxious and it's overthrow and the death of this sacrament thing follow each other perhaps such secrets are still being kept uh perhaps they are, i--- the fact that this bundle weed could turn up so alter date probably means their are shamanic lineages with secrets that we don't know as a field ethno botanist and an explorer i'm always interested in the unconfirmable rumor and there are some doozy's uh the mysterious beatle from eastern brazil which causes intense hallucinogens if eaten here's a career for somebody Noooo hallucinogenic insect has ever been found and yet there are persistent rumors in different parts of the world of either a butterfly or a beatle that is uh hallucinogenic most shamans in the amazon if you spend five or six weeks with them and take ayawausca with them and tromp around with them when you finally get to know them, they will allow us how there uh is another magic which they call the magic of the big trees and i've spent half my life trying to find out the names of the big tress and i'm still working on it. we have collectives in peru and nothing is more exciting then a clump of root stuff or a seed packet that comes across our desk, labeled suspect hallucinogen that that gets me to the edge of my chair (laughter) what do you think of robert monroe the journey out of the body man? uh well this a good time to discuss what do i think of all these other things on the spiritual market uh idk what to think about them, i'm not a spiritual consumer uh i've never been to a workshop that was never my own unless it was free and uhhh theres a lot of stuff out there you know astral traveling, channeling, all of this stuff and i tend to believe its bogus or it's for people with a psychic constitution considerably different from my own uh, sometimes people say to me, well these states that you're talking about, can't they be achieved without drugs and the answer to that is, my god, who would want to what what would be proved by achieving these things without drugs if the things i'm talking about, began happening to me without drugs. i would be very very concerned and alarmed (laughter) because umm (laughter) you know i i i just don't uhhh and also i i think theres something to be said for admitting that we cannot do it alone that if you want this spiritual insight, if you want the dianimatrix then humble yourself to the point of making a deal with a plant that's the key, you can't enter the bank without the key to the bank the key to the bank is a plant jumping up and down outside the bank and exerting the banker to recognize your inner worth and open the door is just not uh not going to do it i can understand that psychoactive alkaloids are a survival mechanism for the plants why is that effect psychoactive in man or perhaps animal well first of all maybe we have to argue with your premise you're right that a lot of these so called secondary tritary compounds are elaborated supposedly to make things taste bad or so that birds will spit out things and stuff like that uh but on the other hand, they studied this question fairly closely and a lot of these alkaloids are produced specifically to attract animals, to bring them in, to nactaries as pollinators and that sort of thing uh old style botany always believes these compounds are whats called tertiary to metabolism meaning they're kinda like waste products and not very important, garbage but when you look carefully inside what it plant invariably what you see is that the psychoactive chemistry is going on where metabolism is most active this is an indication that actually these things aren't tertiary at all, they are doing something with the plant but we don't know what it is as to why they have this peculiar effect that they do in us uhhh i think that because there was anciently and over the evolutionary life of human beings actually connection between us and nature and uh that these these drugs are the antenna, the switches, that switch us back towards the logos of uh the natural world i suspect that all of nature is a seamless web of pharamonally mediated connections and interactions and that we are just not yet at an efficient level of analysis uh give it observation to see this interconnected web you know our idea of nature is that it's all tooth and claw survival of the fittest, and the devil takes a high most the NEW version of evolution is entirely different it says that the way you attain survival is by making yourself indispensable to everybody else so it's not by triumphing over the ecosystem that by integrating yourself so throughly into it that it can't function without you then you're on your way to being a dominant species not by crushing the opposition uh lets see how we're doing here what are deconstructionists doing to our understanding of the language? is it helpful? (laughter) hmmm by deconstructionists i suppose you mean uh juckderada and that crowd well i think deconstruction serves a very useful function and we're unaware of uh of what/how throughly language is a medium in which we swim how throughly our world is bult in language in a way the boundary dissolving character of the plant hallucinogens is a dissolving of language barrier they show you that the surface of reality was not the surface of reality, it was the surface of your local language and now it's gone and uh and uh theory is uh what lies beneath it at what point in the evolution of organic matter on earth do psychoactive plants appear and why? interesting question, if we're talking about psychoactive fungi we're severely limited by the fossil record which is no fossil mushroom has ever been found over than 40 million years this is because fossil mushrooms are very soft bodied femoral kind of thing as primary decomposers which is what fungi are doing on this earth it's reasonable to assume that they must have been here fro the very beginning of the conquest of the land but proof in the fossil record has not been forthcoming now if we're talking about higher plants, flowering plants which is mostly what we're talking about here than no flowering plants existed before 65 million years ago flowering plants emerged out of the same catastrophe that destroyed the dinosaurs and set the stage for the emergence of the mammals this is something people don't realize flowering plants are as recent as mammals you know if you look at the if the period of life is visualized as a yard stick, the period of the flowering plants is the last inch and a half and it's also the rise of the mammals occurs in that last inch and a half so before that the plant life on the earth was of a very different sort and we know nothing about it's chemistry to someone who asked a zen question (laughter) what would make the present government interested in the study of psychedelics? (laughter) i don't know, they could make a buck out of it uh i don't think they're very interested in psychedelics i don't think any political - but "they were very interested in psychedelics" - except that they abandoned it, yes mk ultra, stood for mind control mind control ultra was the program the via pursued in the 1960s where they tried out all kinds of psychedelic drugs and they also worked with this in combination with hypnosis they were trying to make what they would call the trojan horse this is somebody who would be an assassin but not even know it and uh how far they got with all of this we would never know because of course it all disappeared behind the walls of secrecy but the declassified history of the cia and led is very interesting some of you may know the book acid dreams by uh by uh martin lee uh fascinating history of the way the government tried and really failed i think to use psychedelics that the governments initial approach was uh this is great this is a truth syrim we can give this to enemy agents and they'll tell us all we know well a few months of following that path they decided no (laughter) this is an obscurity drug we can give this to our agents and they can take it if they're captured and no one can learn anything from it (laughter) and clearly this was not a fruitful path either and i really don't fault the government, i don't really fault the government for this after all the government is in the business of being the government i don't think any institution can incocate psychedelics into it's own program, because psychedelics destroy institituation all institutions it's like trying to move an acid around that corrodes whatever pipes you poor it through and because the boundary resolving quality of psychedelics is precisely the quality that government is involved in resisting government builds up label, pans out role models, explains how everything is and this stuff just then melts that, melts that into a primal chaos so it's pretty corrosive of any social values that don't arise spontaneously out of biological organization it's anarchists, it's the acid of anarchy in a way alright we're never gonna get through this list, but it's gratifying to know that it's here if we need to (laughter) heres a question about the time wave which i'm gonna skip because we're not talking about the time wave today and pitty the poor soul whose never heard of it know of any herbal sources to raise seratonin as a treatment for depression? uh no i'm not uh i don't uh know a lot about herbal medicine and that sort of thing but uh raising seratonin level as a treatment for depression seems likes a pretty good strategy um i don't know of herbs, usually inhibition seratonin is whats going on and with these psychedelics they do compete with seratonin for the bond site that what it's all about at the atomic level is in your synaptic cleft in the synaptic clefts of your neurons there are uh what are called receptors and if you were to fly down and look at these things they look like complex locks their hooks protuberances, little drawers and fit in places, well then the drug molecule comes - is carried into the synaptic cleft by the blood stream and it seeks to whats called occupy the bond site or simply bond and it's trying to fit in well the normal thing which fits in those bonding sites is seratonin but some of these hallucinogens are much better fits than natural serotonin they are what pharmacologists say - competitive at the bond site and so they literally elbow the seratonin out of the way and then they fit themselves into the receptor well once the receptor and it's uh it's fit it's against are in place then the biodynamic the bioelectric uh field of the synapse can be activated well if you swap out serotonin for an exotic molecule like harmine or mescaline or something like that well then this shifts the mode of this huh molecular level electrical environment and i believe that that is what registers as a higher cortical experience that we call the trip it's the experience of hundreds of millions of these introduced molecules displacing the normal serotonin and then broadcasting this signal in the slightly different way than it is normally perceived so theres a molecular connection theres a connection down into the molecular level this will be our last one this morning language transcendence, huxley jung and others often mention liberating and enlightening epiphanies as beyond language and iconic imagery, you yourself mention this, can you explain further the use of transcendental language? yeah and we might talk about that a little this afternoon i sort of alluded to it this morning my idea is that language is a process that is half completed in us as we sit here and that languages really something which wants to be seen not heard but that we are on our way to evolving toward this visible language and we currently are operating with these somewhat substandard acoustical codes where i make small mouth noises they go through the air, they strike your ear, you look in a culturally validated dictionary, if your dictionary is like my dictionary and you understand what sin your dictionary then we say we are communicating but in a visual language in a visibly beheld language there is no culturally validate dictionary there is simply hard wired kind of animal language that we all understand instantly from birth without any cultural acclamation to it, because it is the natural language of human beings of getting out, revealing, defining, refining, uh this natural language the place where the psychedelics impact upon us as social creatures is the language domain i mean you may have tremendous horrofinies and break throughs but if you can't talk about it or paint about it or dance about it or in any way communicate it to anybody then it is not efficacious for the species its just your private entertainment so the domain of language is where the collective impact is coming and one of the things i think about psychedelics is that they are probably capable of helping us force the evolution of language because we cannot move into the future any faster than our uh language of description for the future so if we're interested in stream lining culture and getting away from this sort of random lock style of culture evolution then we have to look at rationally uhhh interfacing with the evolution of language and maybe we can talk about that when we come back thanks very much um (applause) i appreciate you sitting for this (continued applause) 1:52:13 brian when you get a minute - yo um this morning was sort of an intro uhhh in case people needed to be brought up to speed we discussed basically the distribution of these psychoactive plants with a history of shamanic use and then discussed a little bit about the history of them and i didn't really finish with that uh because i want to stress uh that this - i think what we talked about this morning is we got them all to a good place we got them all to paradise in africa with clear vision much food and plenty of horsing around and then we broke for lunch uh the forces that created that partnership society in pre-history the forces that allowed the emrrence of a none male dominant social style were the same forces which then eventually destroyed it as well because it was nothing more than climateolgical change is what was happening uh as the african continent became drier uh the grass lands retreated the water holes became less frequent and further apart and the mushroom came under pressure because of increased dryness and at that point i think probably uh the mushroom festivals became less and less frequent the whole thing became more tenuous and there was great pressure then to try and figure out how to preserve the mushrooms through the dry times of the year, to have them available for ceremonies and i think that uh it's the uh the use of honey as a preservative that uh really set the stage for things to go wrong because honey um turns into a psychedelic compound on it's own if you do nothing to it but leave it alone it ferments it becomes mead and mead is a premitive kind of alcoholic beverage so over several mellenia what began as an ecstatic mushroom cult turned into a beer cult, a cult of alcoholic intoxication, and then you get the same shift of ratios that you see in our own society i mean how many women in our own society have there first sexual experiences in an atmosphere of alcohol abuse and misuse the two almost go together and less in the twentieth century before the twentieth century it's almost possible to imagine nobody got laid for a thousand years in the west without being juiced up because it was pretty unappetizing i can imagine so this is a way in which sensory modalities and emphasis on different aspects of psyched change over time, uh without a culture even being aware of it and then i talked this morning a little bit about the - the fall into history the neurotic, dysfunctionalism that characterizes historical existence and i think it's worth going back to that because some people have the idea that psychedelics are a kind of instant psychotherapy and that they address the concerns of the individual but they're not concerned to link it up to history to see what it was for us in the past and what it's absence has done for us i think that the whole phenomenon that we call the fall into history is the uh uh scenario of abandonment that we underwent as we broke the umbilical connection to the guy in matrix of organic life thats what we were um imbedded in in this african context but when africa dried up and we move out of africa and into the middle east we then were transformed from nomadic pastoralists into primitive agriculturists and then later city builders and the entire pattern of male dominance and anxiety is set in place if you look at the world of seven thousand BC the most uh - the most sophisticated human structure on the earth of let's say 7500 BC is at jeriko in what is now palestine and it what is it? it's a grain storage tower, built at jeriko 72-75 BC uh it indicates that the primitive pastoral nomadic form has given way now to an agricultural form that uh allows for the accumulation of surplus and hence the need to defend sane and hence the establishment of have and have not psychology and so forth and so on so all of the institution that we now must attempt to reform and grapple with began then! urbanization kingship, male dominance, representative politics all of these things uh begin then and uh are further exacerbated a couple or 3 thousand years later by the western decision to go with the genetic alphabet see a genetic alphabet further removes you away from anything uh concrete or real or related to nature theres no ideogram theres no gliff there isn't even rebus theres simply an abstract symbol which stands for a sound i mean this is about as far away from the hands on approach of language that you could get well the culture that made these decisions which is our culture the culture of europe and the ancient middle east has evolved into the dominant culture on the planet and has put in place, institutions like science and so forth and so on our metaphors have grown every more cogent in there ability to manipulate matter and energy as they have evolved less and less relevance to our selves, so now we have ideological systems of tremendous power that none of us can understand or relate to this is kind of an odd relationship to knowledge since knowledge is supposed to be an experience of empowerment not an experiment of disempowerment but our society has done it differently so we all wander around with a sense of disempowerment because we're surrounded by accomplishments which we couldn't possibly duplicate well i mention all of this because i think it shows where the solution lies if we were in balance 1500 years ago and it was achieved through the use of psychedelics de emphasis of the ego non existence of the nuclear family and the suppression of the concept of ownership we should look at these as possible styles of existence that might be put in place in uh in the future that's the psychedelic society that you've heard me talk about at various times well that's probably enough on that - 2:01:30 ohyou thought so too(laughter) when said we'd look at the geographical distribution, the history, and then the phenomenology i thought that we would put most of the phenomenology of the thing in here in this section because it is important to establish just what we're talking about and also to empower people to describe their own experiences which are often so peculiar that unless there is a group such as this a person tends to just define themselves as starkers i mean what else can you say about some of this if your starkers and you get ten people to agree with you you're not starkers anymore you're a movement ahem so i mentioned this morning about DMT and i made a bit the kind of paradigmatic compound because it's so brief so natural so powerful so quick to recover from and it's also a very good paradigmatic case when talking about what the psychedelic experience is like to have because i think if you have the DMT experience on the way to the center of that flash you'll probably have all the other ones it seems to lie at the center of the mandala the most startling thing about the dmt flash and i mentioned this this morning when we were talking about jung is how astonishing it is that death by astonishment seems the major danger and this is even if you're an art historian a jungian an athesian nodo of symbols of so forth and so on it seems to come from some dimension orthogonal to the human world and it is not a unitary experience, the way the famous white light and all these others wordless indescribable elusive mercurial things are it isn't like that at all it's uh it's extremely multiplisic and it's extremely specific in it's presentation i mean when you smoke dmt you have the feeling that you have burst into a place that you have not had a psychological experience you are not having a mental experience you have burst into some kind of a space and within that space ummm there the first shock is that it's inhabited and this is the shock i've never recovered from because it was just the last thing i expected to find inside a chemical compound was the equivalent of a bugs bunny cartoon uh it is inhabited by um entities is the only word to describe them and they are as i've said many times, they are like jeweled self dribbling basketball and their many of them and they come out of the background and they present themselves to you they're literally vibrating up and down, they're fasented and rotating and they see you as clearly as you see them they even uh greet you some of you may recall the pink floyd the old pink floyd song the gnomes have learned a new way to say hooorayyy i think it's on pipette the gates of dawn it's the first album those floyd fans were looking puzzled it's because it was 40-years ago (laughter) anyway as you burst into this space the gnomes say hooray and they present themselves and they are truly the gnomes of uh central european fairytales archetypal gnomes they are uh they sing and out of their singing elfin chatter condense objects which look like nothing at all in this world i mean the closest i've been able to come to them are the furbish the edges of furbished eggs you know they constricructs in sapphire and ivory and crystal and vitreous glass that uh the french designer fabruche created well these things are like that but theyre like that raised to some excruciating pinnacle of completion because as they show you these objects you know beyond any possibility of contravention that a sif a single one of these objects were to exist in this world it would change this world forever if a single one of these objects existed in this world we would spend a thousand years studying this object the last time this happened was a guy gave a speech on a hill about moral obligation we've studied it for a thousand years um this is the same kind of thing and these fabruche hyper-dimensional objects are themselves undergoing a dynamic transformation they're not static objects like the fabruche eggs they are undergoing changes, singing, condensing other objectt, these objects are crawling all over the ground in front of you, clamoring for your attention now remember 12 seconds before you were sitting in a suburban living room somewhere grappling with some drug somebody wanted you to take now all of that's gone and here are these things i call them types because i wanted to capture the sense of their childlike-ness i don't know why i call them types it just seemed like the appropriate thing if some of you are classessist or students of literature of pre-socratic philosophers you might recall the 50 second fragmented paraclytus which says uh "the aeon is the child at play with colored balls" "the aeon is a child playing with colored balls" and when you break your way into the presence of the aeon it's extremely uh idk it's upsetting you can't believe it's happening, theres a lot of cognitive dissonance you could believe this if it just weren't happening to you and there is this tremendous affection and interesting humanity and then there is urgency a lot of urgency the types want to initiate you, they have a message and the message is you can do what we are doing and what they're doing is using their voices to make this ecologics condense out of the air they're saying, you can do this, do it, do it, DO IT and their on you and they jump in and out of your chest which is something described in the amazon too the hiculay in the tryptamine snuff cults of the amamano that they jump in and out of your chest and they're saying do this thing, do it, do it, suspend your belief and eventually you do do it you you discover that you can drop the filter of meaning that your voice can move back several registers and out comes elf chatter and this elf chatter is able to ring the air in front of you like a wash cloth and get out chemical gold to drip out of the air and to begin to condense in front of you well by this time most people would like to call time out (laughter) so they can make phone calls to various philosophers but theres no time out, it just keeps going uhhh, and these things have a very, the aura of strangeness of aliens is palpable theres an emotion in there that we just don't have in this world because it composed of unbelievable alieness in the presence of unbelievable familiarity it's an ecstasy that is a coincident appositorum simultaneously it is both what it is and what it is not and the human mind can't handle that, that's called cognitive dissonance, and you just go into a a conixifit of some sort well the very fist time i smoked DMT in 1967 with absolutely no expectation this happened to me and it has happened every time since and then i've had occasion to observe people taking DMT uh in countries where it's legal and what i see is there is an archetype which surrounds DMT which you must make your way through it but at the center of the archetype the archetype is not present in only the alien it's present the archetype is that of the circus or the carnival the carnival think for a moment about the carnival it has two aspects, one is blazing light and activity at the center of the triple ring the lady in the spangle costume is high above the main floor and the lions and the tigers and the clowns are parading around - that's part of it but it has another aspect. just off to the side of the big tent, there are the side shows. The hooch coach dancers. The two headed man, and so forth and so on in other words theres this kinky peculiar shadow side of it and i often uh if any of you are fans of the film of federico feline here's a man who understood the archetype of the circus and how if you remember in amachor that circus or if you remember juliette dislike the flaming doorway into the room with the bed of the bed springs and the crate paper flame these are carnival, carnival images that relate back to uh DMT when you finally come into the center of it these are all seen to be veils it veils itself that way because that's how you uh it's the old candy to the baby routine it treats us as people who would to go to the circus and then it takes us to the circus but then there is a revelation beyond that and i, i don't know how many people present in this room have confronted the thing i'm talking about i'm always at the moment aware that some people are saying, "my doesn't he perfectly get it" and other people are saying "huh? what is this, what is this guy talking about?" the point i want to make is it's real, it's not vague you don't have to strain for it. nobody wonders whether or not it happened to them, it's just like somebody walking up to you taking you by the arm saying "there's something i insist on showing you, come this way please." and i am very -it is the presence of the entities that shattered the person who i was. because i was a scientific rationalist a reductionist i had no no room for elves in my cosmology (laughter) and here they were, hundreds of them. So it seems to me that this is a central question that shamanism has always dealt with. perhaps not witht eh kind of ontological specifications hat we imagine ourselves to have but this is the question that must be asked who's int here, who is this there are at least 3 possibilities, and i'm not sure which is the most conservative the first possibility is that um we don't understand how the world is constructed, and that in fact there is a parallel universe running alongside of ours, uh full of elves who use a language to make an object. and then why you can burst through to this place on this one drug then it raises each explanation, raises a lot of questions and then the other possibility is uh um this is the jungian possibility and jung and i can't remember which one it was, but one of the alter things he talks about these elves. because of the caber the caber are the alchemical children that appear in act three of foist that jung spent a lot of time on these alchemical caber and the question of the humungulous and uh he says in one place, i think he says, uh uh, he describes them as autonomous psychic elements that have escaped from the control of the ego this is a weird way to go about it, i means it's probably an accurate description but how much does it tell us you know? it means that the psyched is to be visualized as a half gallon of mercury. and when we throw it on the floor the mercury balls up and spreads everywhere/ each ball of mercury by god it has a little face looking back at you. that's because mercury is a mirrored surface, you're looking at your own psyched shattered into pieces around you. another possibility and one i leaned toward for ears, and i still lean toward. because i've noted the radical nature of your explanation diminishes with the distance since the last time ou smoke DMT. uh the longer it's been, the more likely you are to have some humdrum notion that you can poor it into. so the humdrum notion that i settled on was the clearly these are just extraterrestrials. they don't come in silver ships demanding to be taken to the national defense agency. this is how they come, why they come this way, who knows? they're coming through mind, mind is the medium in which they travel. where did they come from? who knows, can it even be located in the newtonian space-time matrix. i mean what do you want here, a star catalog number, would that satisfy you? and then finally, i think i've exceeded my number of possible explanations (laughter) and then finally the explanation which is my current favorite, it's a little disturbing and i haven't quite figured out what to do with it. but i'm on the sense that we're on the right track here. the reason that the DMT space feels so peculiar, both alien and excruciatingly familiar is uh because these things in this other place represent what i call an ecology of souls. this place is the one place you never thought you were going to make a visit to and come back to and chat it around the coffee maker. this, they're dead, that's who these things are. this is the realm of the dead. well i have to confess in all of my psychedelic voicing and idea mongering, i never was able to go that far to reach that far in my imagination. it sort of had to be presented to me but if you go to shamans, world wide, and talk to them about their spirit helpers, and say you know what's the deal with this, whoa are these things. - 2:19:35 they say, well these are the ancestors, didn't you know these are the ancestors. it's perfectly cut and dried and normal uhh i i had an occasion i won't use his name to embarrass him but i had occasion to expose a very well known tibetan high mucky muck to DMT and he said after he took it like a man said after words. that is the lesser life. that is the lesser life. and if any of you are student's f mayahani buddhism you know that the lesser lives are the lives you see at the edge of the bardo as you start in to the 42 day process of dying, you encounter the lesser lives this guy was saying to me. you can not go further in the body and have any expectation of retiring. in other words, once you have seen the lesser lives, you have stretched the umbilicus to matter to the breaking point, if you go one step further, it's eternity for you. well i don't know how i feel about this. the the head type i've had to then ask myself, the head tyk is that me? do you actually encounter your dead soul? is there a dimensions here you are both simultaneously both dead and alive, both simultaneously witness and observer. um i don't know. but i certainly think that if we're going to use a conservative explanation for these things. the only the only theory more conservative then that they are dead people. is the theory that says that they are nothing whatsoever. and that just simply will not serve. i think it would come as a tremendous surprise to twentieth century civilization. if orthogonal to all our expectations of space flight and virtual reality, and all this techno shmechno stuff that we're lining up in front of us. that there would be a broadside from ninety degrees out from the unexpected, and that there would be a doorway swinging into the realm beyond organic existence. i resisted this fiercely. but i just don't know what we're going to do with these DMT creatures, if we don't try to find a rational explanation. and the - any rational explanation will be exotic because the facts of the matter are exotic. those of you who have not had this experience or sitting there thinking it would never happen to me. you're full of it (laughter) it will happen to you. this isn't this doesn't require the willful suspension of disbelief, this doesn't require a pure heart or dietary prescription. no this is part of the human birth right. and the fact that we deny the existence of a non-human entity, intellectual intelligence on this planet is just part of our heritage from rationalism. and you know, you don't have to take it very seriously, because rationalism the philosophy that gives us permission to deny the invisible world, you know who founded the philosophy off rational materialism? any takers? aristotle was early, i think i give credit to renee decart for modern materialism and rationalism. well uh you know who told renee decart to found rationalism and materialism, an angel! (laughter) are you ready for this, this is a suppressed history episode in the history of human thought. here are the facts folks. 1619 renee decart is 21-years old. he's a young frenchman in search of adventure, he joins a hoops army that is going off to prague to lay siege to prague, to put down an alchemical revolt there. they kick butt on these alchemists, win the war and their on their way back to france, and in september 1619, this french army camped ulm in southern germany. some of you may know ulm as einsteins home town. in fact that figures in our story oblichuely as you will see this french army camps at ulm and renee decart hits the hay and in the middle of the night an angel appears to this young man, in the radiance of his rooms and says "the mastery of nature is to be achieved through number and measure" modern science is founded folks right there, right then. by an angel. so how you know, how far away are the informing voices. How rational is rationalism. how material is materialism? all of you must know i'm sure the famous story of kukulay the german chemist kukulay who discovered the benzymene ray. he was struggling with the problem and physical chemistry could not figure it out. fell asleep in his study and the oraboric serpent appeared before him in his dreams. and took it's tale in it's mouth and he came out of sound sleep and said i've got it. he got to the blackboard and he drew the first benzene ring angelic intervention. intervention from the unconscious. so my, i - the point of all of this is to suggest that human history is completely interpenetrated by the peculiar, the non-human, that which has intentionality and affection for mankind. for humanity. and this is what shamans call to their aid. this is how the curing is done, it's done through these spirit helpers. they're called, elemental. and um. so far as i know jungians is the only modern intellectual position where you can even raise this issue without having a matt dropped over you. i mean this is absolutely forbidden by the modern world view. uh and yet it lies very very close to the surface in our culture. i mean as an example of how close to the surface it lies in our culture, consider for a moment, um, santa claus. what's this about? santa clause is the master of the elves. the elves that he is master of are demon artificers. they make toys for the world children in their vast underground toy shops. and where are these underground toy shops? at the north pole. i don't have to tell a room full of jungians that the north pole is the axis munid, idrisil, the magic world ash, the center of the mandala. what are the colors of santa clause? red and white, the colors of amanita muscaria absolutely. what is the particular animal of santa clause, reindeer. reindeer are very central to the amanita muscaria cult because reindeer uh eat the mushroom and then excrete their urine and this is thought to be a cleaner and easier way to take the mushroom than to take it on the so-called first path. the second path is after the reindeer have had it. an anecdotal side, if you're ever in the yakut basin one of the great par ells of the intoxicated amanita user is to crawl out of the yurt in the middle of the night to take a leak in the snow and before you can back off the reindeer come and knock you headlong, because they want to get to this amanita flavored soul. so here is santa clause right in the center of our culture and when you take it apart, all of the motifs are there. the demonartificers the elves, the cosmic axis, uh, the magical flight. it's a beautiful example of the preservation of pagan psychedelic use into uh a modern context. what can we say about this? oh well i know, one more thing i wanted to say about it. that this program that these tyk's are pushing is a language skills program. and we don't know how long people have been bursting into this place. this may be the source of language. you know - where di language come from? we learned it from elves in hyperspace is as good a possibility as any other. and this is still on-going. this language reformation program. they want us to activate our language forming ability and language is the DMT flash i said this morning. it's something beheld. syntax is something potentially to be looked at. not to be heard. and we don't understand this because for us language is something that you hear. we can't imagine a language that you see. but have you ever noticed the way in which we preserve clarity of intention in language with verbal metaphors? we say, i see what you mean, he painted a picture. it means we unconsciously believe that truth will be beheld and some of you who are students of the ancient literature may know phylojudaeus, uh helenistic alexandrian jew, absolute contemplate christ, born before died after. in one of his treatises on the logos, which he was always talking about. phylogudeaus presents an edimology of the word israel, and he says, isreal means "he who sees god" this is this meaning of the word god. and then he goes on to say uh this 'he who sees god' he's talking about that and he says "what would be the more perfect logos?" now i assume most of you would know the logos was an informing voice, a voice in the head. which was the scenic qua non of alexandrian spirituality. uh socrates had it, plato had it. the logos. so philojudeaus asked "what would be the more perfect logos?" and then he answers his own question he says "the more perfect logos would go from being heard to being beheld without ever crossing over a noticeable moment of transition." well that is precisely what you encounter in deep psychedelic experiences and the DMT flash. you behold the logos. In the initiation of experience. you don't behold it, you hear it. it sounds in michael harness wonderful phrase "like the sound of rushing water" or like the sound of tinkling bells. and it's very far away and then it begins to come closer, you can you can, you vein to forma picture of it in your minds in the way you would of a napoly marching band that you just heard it about a half-mile away and the pa pa pa is getting bigger, coming closer. this is the elf parade. and when it finally comes into view it actually goes without ever passing over a noticeable moment of transition from being heard to being seen. through the phenomenon of approach. you hear it before you see it then you see it far away then you see it very close. and when you see it very close it who cares what it sounds like because you're see ing it. this more perfect logos is what the tyk's the spiritual helpers want to teach. and i think that it's import ant to spend a little time on this because i think this would have tremendous historical impact upon our situation if we could by hook or by crook create a uh a more visible logos, a language which could be seen. You probably all considered at some time or another, what would telepathy be like? and i think most people answer that question by thinking telepathy would be for me to hear what you think, but how would it be telepathy worth for me to see what you mean. that's telepathy. it put's you in the other guys shoes. if you stand in the other persons shoes you are the other person. to have a persons point of view is to be that person in regard to that single atom of experience. so i've spent time with virtual reality people, and all these technical folks, because i think visual language is something that wants to be born. and it may be that it is - can be technologically coaxed into existence, that we're gonna have to wear goggles or have fast computers. or it may be that it can be physiologically coxed into existence. there may be drugs which shift the processing of language from being an auditory phenomenon to being a visible phenomena. aywausca is an excellent candidate for this.uh if you spend time with the ayawausca taking populations in the amazon, theres great stress in these populations on acquiring what's called an ekaro ekaro means magical song. and the ekaro is a spontaneous chant like song which comes to you during the intoxication. the thing that's interesting about these ekaro's is that they are critiqued as visual objects, not as sound. people never say of an ekaro, it sounded beautify. they allays say it looked lovely. and then people will say, but there should have been more blue (laughter) this kind of thing, it's clearly being criticized as a visual modality. well i think that these ryawasca using people are at the cutting edge of evolution. 2:37:40 they are forcing the evolution of the modality of language. it may be that the processing of language is not hard wired not physiologically wired. it's uh software function, having todo with culture, language, upbringing and so forth. because some people claim they are grade visualizers and they do think visually and so forth and we have no reason to deny this so it amy be that we are just a one gene, or even an expression of gene ratio's different away from an entirely different way from processing communication between each other. and this is what the new age, the end of history, the anticipation of this great breakthrough that we can feel but not really outline is about. if that seems far fetched to you, you should notice how far fetched the original emergence must have been. because i think people were fully people and totally mute and you know unable to articulate a thought. and then either an accumulation of neuro's or some synergistic effects was brought into play and low and behold spoken language emerged out of that. well something similar could happen to us. in the morning session i talked about the uh forced evolution of language, paying attention to our language. i really think that the way to think of these psychedelics is as catalysts for the imagination. uh if any of you are chemists you know that a catalyst is something that when you add it to a chemical process, the process is tremendously speeded up, but in the end the catalyst is not destroyed. the catalyst is reconstituted at the end. so psychedelics, one way of thinking of them, is as a catalyst for cognition. the original description of psychedelic drugs was that they were consciousness expanding drugs. well if we take the idea that they are consciousness expanding seriously for even a moment then we have to put a lot of attention in on this because it's the absence of consciousness that is murdering us and our planet. we need all the consciousness that we can get, we need to reign it out of computers, get it out of plants, raise it in ourselves and children. wherever we can get it, uh we need it and the present, you know the present situation with the planet is very dire. very dire because of us. our unchecked evolution in a single direction along the gradient of culture has now created a toxic planet that is an endangered planet. uh. since this situation has arisen entirely within the confines of history aren't we going to have to look outside of history in order to redress this problem, i think so. and when we do look outside history, then we find the institution of plant shamanism there, waiting to inform us, to educate us, and to show us how to set a course out of the present dilemma. i don't think we can find our way out by ourselves. i don't think we can get high by ourselves and i don't think as a species that we can save the planet by ourselves. we have to have a partner. we have to uh get an ally into this situation. uhhh just in closing and as an example, the mushroom as a tremendous problem solving ability. and because we can talk to it, we can ask it questions. we can actually get a non-human perspective on human problems. a few weeks ago i made this statement before a group of people somewhere, and after the talk was over, somebody came up to me and said well why don't you ask the mushroom how to save the world? and i just put it off, thought it was the wrong attitude, but then later i wondered about this questions, how to save the world. and i thought maybe i've been to circumspect with the mushroom maybe i should just put it to it. so i carried out the experiment. and put to them, how do we save the world. Now i don't offer the solution, i'm going to tell you the mushrooms answer. so you can see how our backs aren't quite to the walls yet. theres still avenues to be explore. i said to the mushroom "how can we save the world" there was a hesitation of 1/3 of a second approximately. and then the mushroom said, no woman should raise more than one natural child. and i said, "what?" said no woman should raise more than one natural child. so i took that home with me and i thought about it, uh here are the consequences following that piece of advice. uh the population of the earth would be cut in half in 60-years. fifty years fallowing that it would be cut in half again, 50 years after that in half again. in 1 hundred and 50 years the population of the earth could be under a billion people. nobody was shot, no wars were fought. no one was told they could not have a child. no one was coerced, no one was starved. um. then i started looking into this thing about children and population. and most of you, like me. probably imagined that the world has a population problem. and this population problem is going on in places like pakistan and bangledesh and god dangit those little brown people will just not stop having children well i looked into it and i'ev got a surprise for you a child born in america will use between 600- and 1thousand times more natural resources and energy than a child forn to a woman in bangladesh. Suppose you went to bangledesh and you met a woman,a young woman of child bearing age, and she told you that her ambition in life was to have a thousand children. you'd be appalled, i mean what kind of social responsibility is this, what kind of a person are you that you want to do this. an american woman having one child is having the equivalent of those thousand infants. now another interesting thing about this suggestion made by the mushroom. that each woman should rear one natural child. when we think of population control schemes, the first objection is "my god you can never sell this to people, they have these religions they have these centuries and so forth they just won't watch" notice that what the mushroom suggested is most likely to be accepted by the person most important to convert. we don't want to convert the woman of the backstreet of bangladesh to this policy. we want to convert the woman of sherman oak, malibu, pandemoniac, gross point, boston, philadelphia. because these are the woman whose children are using the resources. so here's in one sentence. the mushroom was able to answer a question i put to it, with a suggestion i had never dreamed of, that seems at first glance a way to stand up pretty well. and i've spent a lifetime trying to figure out ways to solve this proble, see we're a little stupid, because we're all alike. Something years ago the mushroom said to me which deals with this was uh people are always - this question of enlightenment, and the mushroom said for one human being to expect to obtain enlightenment from another is like a grain of sand on the beach expecting to attain enlightenment from another grain of sand on the beach. don't you get it, you're all grains of sand. i mean joe shmo who runs a body shop and mookdaruby baba are the same people. theres no difference between these guys, no reason to assume so. uh so i think we need help and that little exercising what do you do about the population problem shows that there are suggestions out there that we haven't thought of, avenues that we haven't tried. when i thought about why we haven't we tried this avenue of one woman one natural child it took me about thirty seconds to understand that its real hard to make a buck in this situation when population is retracting at a rate of fifty-percent per generation. and our whole world is based on making a buck. i told this idea to someone and they said, but if the woman of malibu stop having children they will lose all their political power. because political power is numerical. this is not true. political power is power. and if the woman of malibu stop having children they will be quite a bit wealthier than they already are. notice that this deciding to voluntarily have one natural child is also very helpful to you personally. that uh a woman will have to work less hard. will shave to cut fewer deals with the in place structure of male dominance if she was only one child. a woman with two children has got to cut a deal with male dominance or she has a trust fund or something uh the reason we are i think instinct - we have a tendency to clench at a suggestion and not follow it through, uh is because we imagine there is something holy and sacred about the nuclear family and that we don't want to attack this biological unit that has such integrity. but this is a bunch of nonsense, the nuclear family has no biological integrity whatsoever, it's a creation of the post industrial reformation. the extended family is the natural human unit to ease the pressure child-rearing on young woman. and to give everybody the benefit of contact inter-generational contact and so forth. no this nuclear family that our politicians are always beating their breath about, is the absolute caldron of neurosis in this society as far as i can see. and when you look at the demographics about what is happening, the number of house holds that are one woman one child household i think you can see that maybe our unconscious has already been in communication with the mushroom and it's just the ego that's gonna get the news last. well i don't want to spend too much time on that but it's an example of how these things offer solution to human problems. and if it can offer solutions to a human problem like over-population by six billion people on a planet, then it can surely take care of the needs and concerns of a group of rainforest hunter gatherer's that number 70 or so people. i doubt that they can conceive of a question that doesn't have an answer to, because it can operate on many levels, uh simultaneously. and this is an example of consciousness in action, you see - me plus nothing had nothing new to say about the population problem, me plus psilocybin had a whole new take, a suggestion. we can slaughter it down and ultimately decide it's a bunch of larch but at least there was a new thought a new try a new hope. this is the consequences of consciousness. and we're beset by problems like this, and we shouldn't assume that they are insoluble simple because we haven't solved them intact we must assume they are solvable otherwise we are not gonna have a place to hang our hat in fifty years. but the solution comes through a act of humility, an act of opening to the dynamic of nature, the feminine, the psychy, the ego is the calcarious knot, tumorous tissue that stands outside of all that. it cannot be trusted, it cannot be relied upon. uh and so by attempting to dissolve that, to mitigate it's hard edges, to smooth it out into the greater context of being, then we really discover uh what humanness is about because humanness is not something that an be encompassed form the point of view from the ego that's why creating the ultimately egoist society we created a society with so little humanity in it you know and i see the psychedelics as a - an - make the world a better place then as we found it which is certainly not our record so far but it's not too late, i mean HG wells called history a race between education and disaster it's not mere coincidence nor even mere synchronicity that at this moment in time and space with these tremendous crisis bearing down upon us that we have reached out to the archaic peoples with a new attitude, not an attitude of how can we enslave them, but how can we learn from them. and my hope is that here in the final kicking of the clock of history, we are going to end our prodigal decent into the desert world of the ego, and return with what we have learned. the fruits of the prodigal journeying of the evan son which is what history has been. return with the fruits of that prodigal wandering to the larger human family that waits on us in the rain forests, in the deserts, in the marshes in the thorn forests of this planet. the archaic people are waiting for us to get on the train and then the train will be able to be part. but we have to awaken to our past and then we can set a course toward a meaningful future. that's the wrap (clapping, applause) 2:54:43 Deus Ex McKenna - Address to the Jung Society - 2:54:43 to 3:35:35 is mislabeled - this segment is from Rites of Spring 0:09:40 to 0:50:45 -- already transcribed at https://terencemckenna.wikispaces.com/The+Rites+Of+Spring. The Q&A (the second of two question periods during this seminar) for Address to the Jung Society has not yet been transcribed and is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKZTV5bXw9w&t=1h3m20s - questions begin at 1:03:20.