Audience: The point I was trying to get at is that in order to form these sounds there’s some sort of electronic, neurological something going on in the synapses to cause the muscles to form the sounds, and there’s a radiation of electric energy that starts the mechanical-acoustical coupling to the vocal chords, and in trying to figure out the mechanism you were discussing, how would you make this work? Would you actually see the sound coming out of the throat? It would seem more reasonable to me to pick the electronic model and the radiation of electromagnetic energy, rather than acoustical, to project this information.


True, although it is interesting that sound can be used to form holograms, which are three- dimensional objects. In other words, there are what are known as acoustical holograms, not generated by lasers, but generated by patterns of interference that are acoustic waves. For years, in the psychedelic states I could hear this translinguistic stuff but never do it. Then I became able to do it on the drugs, and then after many more years I’ve been able to do it pretty much on the natch, or at least give a reasonable imitation of it; but when I do it and I’m not stoned, it doesn’t transport me. It has syntax, it has order. I’ll give you a short sample of this. If I’m at all self-conscious or anxious, something shuts down and I can’t, and I know I’m faking it and it’s not real. Nideughey voundwy haxigivitchny moughamvwa takitam didikini hipikektet. It’s like that. It’s far removed from English, it


like that. It’s far removed from English, it sounds to me like a very primitive language. The image that comes to my mind is of pygmies around a fire, one guy raving. He’s telling a story. There’s something in there; it feels like meaning, but it doesn’t compute to a dictionary. When you do it on your own you just can do it for hours in that state, and it’s very, very satisfying. What you’re hearing is the shadow thrown by a hyperdimensional object that the person making the sound is actually seeing, and you are just rotating this thing, going into it, expanding it, taking it apart, melting it, fusing it, remaking it. Strange stuff. I played this stuff for a linguist, this very straight linguist. I played about a 30 minute burst of it, and he smoked his pipe through it all, and when it was over he said, “No O’s.”


Audience: Did you just make that up? Did you have any images? Can you describe what was going on inside of you when you were doing that?

I was trying to stand aside, I was trying to not do anything to it, I was just trying to let it be, because there will be a part of it and I’ll think as it goes by, “Hmm, sounds French.” The main effort is just to relax and let it be. The way I discovered it is that when I smoke DMT I can’t stop myself. At first I would yell it, and that got my friends concerned. Slowly I’ve been able to bring it down into this conversational level, but it just goes on and on, has a feeling, has a tone, it’s very satisfying to do. That’s why I think that language existed for millennia before meaning. Bowl, bison, reindeer: meaning is just some kind of late thing that was tacked on to language to make it a more practical enterprise, but I think that people were taking drugs and amusing each other with artistic compositions of the sort I just did for you for a long time before they did anything practical with it.

Audience: I was just wondering if you thought that language may have changed around the time that agriculture came in, when things were narrowed down to a few commodities.


I think that language goes through tremendous periods of impoverishment, and I think that was one. The origin point of language is placed at about 35,000 years ago, although on what basis they do this I’m not sure. There is a flute in existence that’s 26,000 years old. That’s pretty interesting, and that’s not the Museum of Atlantis artifacts either, that’s the real thing. The Pythagorean face of number, musical tone, language and proportion is still alive. There’s still something to be learned there. A perfect science, an appropriate science, a science of harmony, resonance, proportion: that is and remains the shamanic ideal, the Orphic ideal, the Pythagorean ideal.

Audience: What are the risks associated with MAOIs and psychedelics?

You do not want to take certain hallucinogens if you’re taking an MAO inhibitor, because it will prolong it and will cause it to behave in unpredictable ways. There are many MAO inhibitors commercially prescribed, some quite strong. In other words, that act for weeks, I think even after a single dosage. What are those things for?

Audience: The common scenario is Marplan, which is a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. What that means is that monoamine oxidase is the enzyme that destroys monoamine, so if you are taking that particular drug and then you take something that builds up in your system like aged cheeses, lentils, maybe mushrooms, wines, fermented kinds of things that have lots of amphetamine-type chemicals in them, then they overload the synapses. It happens because you can’t break it down in your brain and basically it deteriorates. There is one that people did this with and died, so apparently the hallucinogen had some of that build up and it can’t be destroyed properly, so that’s why there’s the warning not to take it.


The hallucinogen is a monoamine, and then if you inhibit the monoamine oxidase, which is the compound which inhibits the monoamine, then the monoamine will accumulate. It’s important to know this because we tend to move in a yuppie environment, and a typical yuppie buffet of good burgundies and good brie is just going to load your system with tyramine, tyrosine, these kinds of things. They are monoamine oxidase inhibitors, and then if you take a hit of ayahuasca 12 or 24 hours later it’s just going to send you skittering all over the board, and you won’t understand why unless you are aware that this monoamine thing is working.

Audience: Someone gave a talk in New York about smoked fish and plantain, and possibly this is a precursor of certain neurotransmitters.

Yes, this is a more complicated question than simply yes or no on the MAO inhibitors. Serotonin, which is, of course, the neurotransmitter that runs the nervous systems of all higher animals and occurs in all animals, is very strongly present in bananas, for example. You can load your system with serotonin without realizing it if you eat a lot of bananas, and that’s very interesting. There was a group of people in tribal Africa who had actually lost the gene for the production of serotonin, or of serotonin-2. In any case, one subspecies of serotonin, and they didn’t know that that was what was wrong with them. All they knew was that as soon as anybody left the tribe they all became psychologically ill, and then they would return to the tribe and this situation would immediately normalize. So they looked into it and they discovered that these people were eating bananas as a huge component of their diet. Consequently, even though the serotonin gene was deficient, they always had a sufficient amount of serotonin because they were getting it from a dietary source.


If somebody left the tribe, left the forest and went to Kampala and got a job and stopped eating so many bananas, they immediately appeared to become mentally ill. This is because they were then finally forced to confront the fact that on the natch they could not produce enough serotonin to stay balanced, so this is an example of how foods and neurotransmitters and all of these things work. It’s really astonishing, the fact that evolutionary biologists, in talking about how human beings have come to be, have so far as I know never talked about the evolutionary influence of diet. The fact that under pressure from dwindling rainforests, we ceased being fruitarian, canopy-living creatures, and instead became omnivores and meat eaters on the plain. In going through that transition we subjected ourselves to a huge amount of mutagenic influence.

There are all kinds of compounds in plants that will break chromosomes, interfere with ovulation, interfere with lactation, interfere with fetal formation, control or accelerate tooth decay, interfere with acuity of vision, digestive enzymes that may or may not work in certain situations. If you just start eating things randomly or testing things to be foods, you’re exposing yourself and your progeny to an immense number of mutagenic influences. This may explain why the human somatotype, the human body type, went through this period of rapid change about 50,000 years ago. This is when the brain size doubled, and then nothing much has happened since to human beings physically; all evolution has gone on in the cultural domain. This sudden explosion in the size of the brain case is occurring at the same time when there is this dietary shift.


One of the things that I mentioned the other night is the preservation of infantile characteristics as a part of our species, not necessarily simply infantilism psychologically, but also our hairlessness, for instance. More primate babies are born hairless, but we’re the ones who stay hairless the whole time. The suppression of secondary sexual characteristics — for instance, our rumps don’t redden when we’re in estrus — and all these things that we see happening in other primate species are suppressed in human beings. There’s a lot of debate about why these things go on. Why, for instance, there isn’t a mating season in human beings, or why it is that female human beings can keep pregnancy a secret for quite a long time before it becomes apparent. How does this feed back into primate social organization? What do males do if they think a female is pregnant or not pregnant? How does this work into the evolutionary thing? There’s a lot of thought that needs to be given to all this.


MAO is one of the most easily influenced of these internal enzyme systems because there are MAO inhibitors in so many things that are human foods — pulses, all beans, fish, cheeses, dairy products, so forth and so on — the very things that were probably fairly prominent in the primitive diet. All monoamines will be more active in a human being who has taken a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. One of the strange things, and I mentioned this yesterday, is that in the Amazon they have figured out how to make this work for them. For instance, DMT cannot be taken orally, it’s destroyed in your gut. If you inhibit MAO then it isn’t destroyed in the gut, it passes through the bloodstream and through the blood-brain barrier. They figured this out; it’s only been since the mid ‘50s or something that the MAO system has been understood by Western medicine. These people apparently intuitively figured it out thousands and thousands of years ago. These things compete with serotonin for the bond site; many of them are in fact inhibitors of serotonin. If you have a huge amount of serotonin in your system, the serotonin can mitigate the trip. It’s a gentler trip because it’s not as strong a trip as it would be had you not loaded yourself with serotonin.

Audience: But some people do, that’s the whole theory of why some people get depressed, that certain people have higher levels of serotonin and certain people have lower, and that if you have higher levels supposedly it correlates with how naturally high you are.


Yes, well it’s sort of hard to nail this down. When people first started doing psychedelic research they thought — it was the so-called psychotomimetic theory of psychedelics — that these things make you crazy, therefore being crazy must be a natural state of producing these things. So for instance, they measured DMT in the blood of schizophrenics, people who are diagnosed as chronic schizophrenics. The problem is that there is no visible correlation. Some people have more, some people have less. It isn’t as simple as that mad people are people who are making their own psychedelic molecules. There was great hope for this in the ‘50s but it didn’t quite pan out.

A thing to bear in mind, sort of related to what you were saying, is that disease, which we accept as part of life, is actually something fairly unusual in nature. The only places in nature where you see a lot of disease happening is in insects. Insects are highly subject to viruses and there’s a huge family of insect viruses. This is the basis of many pesticide design strategies, to spray crops with viruses that attack insects. The other area in the animal world where you see a lot of disease is human beings and the animals they have domesticated. Cattle, pigs, poultry and people are all fairly subject to disease, but for instance, birds of prey are not greatly subject to disease. Fish, all animal groups have some susceptibility to diseases, but really human beings and insects seem to be the most set up for this.


The reason that is advanced for this is that these are the social animals, the insects and the human beings, wherever you have intense social activity. For instance, in some species a male and a female will encounter each other only once in the life of each individual, then have sex and that’s it. There is no social life. No disease can get a foothold there, because diseases require transmission and contact. The AIDS thing is a perfect example of this. The statistics are that a professional prostitute has five or six sexual contacts in an evening. A person at high risk for AIDS with a very active homosexual lifestyle may have three or four times that number of sexual contacts. No virus is going to pass a chance like that up, it’s just like a super intense environment for transmission. The diseases want to be able to move from one person to another. The susceptibility to disease was apparently also something that was going on at the same time as we were beginning to acquire language, to domesticate animals, to switch our diet.

What we really are is the evolutionary wreckage of a very chaotic and crazy series of pattern shifts that went on between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. Now we are the inheritors of that. As long as I’m on this subject, there’s a very interesting relationship between disease and spirituality because pilgrimage sites are the great disease vectors of the ancient world. Here you can imagine that you have a temple, everybody comes there to get cured, and everybody leaves sick because all these infected people have been there. There’s a wonderful book, I can’t remember the author but the title is Plagues and Peoples. It’s a study of epidemiology and the history of disease and its impact on human populations. Very interesting, and it has a lot to say about psychedelic use by implication, because psychedelic use also brings people together under very close and intimate circumstances many times.


Audience: Let me ask a chemical question. I have never done these substances that you’re talking about, specifically N,N-DMT and 5-MeO-DMT and what you’re talking about as ayahuasca, which is a hybrid of an MAOI and DMT. Those are the chemical names of these substances. Are there generic names or so-called street names for these things that you are aware of?

First of all, 5-MeO-DMT doesn’t occur in ayahuasca. The way ayahuasca works is that the MAO is a β-carboline: harmine, harmaline, tetrahydroharmine. These things are hallucinogens in their own right, but only at uncomfortable doses. If you took 600 mg of harmine, you would have hallucinations, but you would also have so much discomfort and icky feeling that you couldn’t call it a trip. 5-MeO-DMT occurs in Anadenanthera peregrina and in the toad foam that I mentioned. It’s interesting that the toad foam is the only animal-based hallucinogen that we know anything about. DMT does occur in certain fish and these fish are eaten for psychedelic effect. DMT is psychedelic in its own right, but not when taken orally. When taken with the harmine it becomes orally active. If you combine 200 milligrams of harmine, which is a sub-threshold dose of harmine, with 50 mg of DMT, which is a sub-threshold dose of DMT, you’ll have a tremendous trip. That’s called ayahuasca, and it comes from these plant sources. You drink it, it’s a beverage. It’s a fluid; tastes terrible.

Audience: You recommended a committed dose, like five grams of mushrooms, in a silent space, preferably at night and also alone.


If that’s your predilection, if you’re comfortable with that. If you’re uncomfortable with that, get a friend. Is that your question?

Audience: I guess that’s my question, because it seems to me from reading Stan Grof’s books that the point he makes is that these substances are physiologically very safe. The danger is in psychological acting out, and for that reason you have someone there, in order to prevent a confusion of what he calls holotropic and hylotropic, i.e. you decide that you want to jump off your balcony and you confuse your psychic reality in which you can fly with the physical reality of your body, which is that you’ll fall off and die.

If you have that delusion you would certainly want a sitter present. In 99% of the cases what the sitter is there for is not to restrain you but to tell you that it’s OK. Just to say that it’s OK, this is immensely reassuring to people, no matter how uncertain the sitter is that it is OK. You could almost have a button that you could push which says, “You’re OK! Don’t worry, it won’t last forever,” something like that. I guess I’m sort of in a funny position on the sitter issue because I find them so distracting, but you do want it, the one time you need them you really need them. The other thing is this issue of whether you should do it indoors or outdoors. What I found is that I really like keeping it mental, that’s my way of controlling the situation. We all know this phenomenon called synchronicity, which is where it’s weird for no reason. If you go out into the world stoned you will just discover that it is a maelstrom of synchronicity, and I don’t like being swept away into strange and unexpected adventures.


This is an example of how this works: I was at Sarnath once, outside of Benares. Sarnath is the place where Buddha preached his first sermon after attaining enlightenment. He was enlightened at Bodh Gaya and then he walked south many miles to the deer park at Sarnath and gave his first sermon there. There’s a stupa there, an ancient stupa, 2nd century B.C., and manicured green parks; a very nice place to take a psychedelic, I thought. So I took this psychedelic, it happened to be mescaline, with these two women who were friends of mine, and there was nobody around. It was very early in the morning, we were sitting up on this little knoll in a tree and it began to come on strongly. I was looking out over this green expanse, and almost at the edge of discernable vision I suddenly see two dots, two people moving orthogonal to my position across my field of vision. Then they got to the middle of my field of vision, and they just stop dead. These two people must be 500 yards away, 1,500 feet away over these rolling green lawns, and they stop dead, they scan and they start toward me. I cannot believe my eyes, that these people have changed course 90 degrees and are now headed right for me. I kept telling myself, “It’s a hallucination, it’s an illusion. They are not getting larger in your field of vision, you are not going to have to confront these people. Please, God, make it so.” No reprieve.


They just keep getting larger and larger, and so I said, “I’m going to make this go away by not looking, and I’m just going to sit like this,” and I sat like this, not moving, until the guy’s feet entered my field of vision. Then I didn’t move, I didn’t say anything. I just looked up, and he said, “You’re from which place? You have been how long in India?” and it was the grilling. Any Indian tourist knows that any citizen of the subcontinent can approach you at any time of the day or night, anywhere, demand to know your name, how long you’ve been in this country, and then the kicker, “And what you think of India?” This question is asked for the specific purpose of observing your discomfiture, because they know damn well what you think of India. I looked up and I gave this guy my most penetrating gaze and I said, “I cannot be interrogated,” and I just put my head down and waited an


and I just put my head down and waited an hour. When I looked up they were gone, but only in that circumstance of being so stoned would I have ever behaved that way. The normal tourist reaction is, and they watch this happen to you, you just go into a tailspin of, “It’s their country, everybody’s a person, I’m a stranger. I should be nice, they’re harmless. What’s so bad about this, anyway?” Then you pare it out, you explain, “I’m from San Francisco, California. I’ve been here three months,” so forth and so on. A friend of mine told me a funny story about taking the Bombay-Calcutta mail and arriving in Calcutta on this train. It’s 4 a.m. and he gets off the train, and there’s a little sadhu man over there, and the guy starts toward him and comes up to him. My friend said, “Wait a minute, before you say a word: my name is Nathan Jones, I’m from Brooklyn, New


name is Nathan Jones, I’m from Brooklyn, New York. I’ve been in India three and a half months and I hate it,” and the guy said, “Ooh, you’re great, baba! You’re reading my mind!” You’ve got to be fast, that’s all there is to it.


Audience: You’ve said that the mushroom tends to create its own agenda. You’ve also given examples of how you’ve directed it. So which of those is true? Are there ways to direct it to specific regions by doing specific things, whether you want to deal with certain issues like death or the body, or to get into certain regions of consciousness?

It has its own agenda. It has certain qualities, this extraterrestrial, outer space, planetary, history is ending, apocalypse, millennia, kind of thing. You can direct it if it likes the way you’re going. It’s sort of like a very strong horse. If you’re going the way it wants to go you’re fully in control, otherwise not. I can remember situations with mushrooms where I hadn’t taken it for a long time and I fall into confusion, and it usually revolves around, “Am I doing the right thing?” whatever the right thing is, so then I’ll take mushrooms and wait until properly stoned, and then put this question to it, “Am I doing the right thing?” It reminds me of a press conference that Lyndon Johnson gave shortly after he became president. Somebody asked a question that he didn’t care for and he said, “What kind of a chickenshit question is that to ask the president of the United States?” When I go to the mushroom and say, “Am I doing the right thing?” it basically said, “What kind of a chickenshit question is that to ask me?” I think that was a very good answer, that was what I needed to hear, you know, “Are you kidding?”


My father used to say, “You can drive a horse to water but a pencil must be lead,” and I think that’s sort of the situation with the mushroom. If the question pleases it, it will answer. If the question doesn’t please it, you’ll hear about it. It is amazing how it gives people what they need. You know that Rolling Stones song, “You can’t always get what you want, you get what you need”? I have a friend, dear friend, but arrogant, no doubt about it. This guy is arrogant, he definitely thinks he has the truth by the throat in most situations, and he won’t take mushrooms because it gives him such a hard time. It says, “You’re arrogant! You want to know what we do to arrogant people?” “For God’s sake, lift it off me!” A certain amount of humility; it’s a relationship, like to a crusty Zen master or something like that. It is really like another entity, because you cannot predict the answers. I remember a dialogue that I had with the mushroom early on where I said, “What are you doing on this planet?” and it said, “You’re a mushroom, you live cheap.” It said, “Listen, this neighborhood was not so bad until the monkeys moved in. To you it may look like a mess, to me it was paradise.”


The mushroom is very, very weird. I’ll tell one more story and then I’ll try to get off stories. I was in Malibu with all these fancy film people and we went out to dinner; Ralph Abraham was there, too. There was this French woman there, a film producer, and she was seated next to me at dinner, and before dinner we had been talking about the mushroom. I had been introduced to her as “the mushroom man,” and she said to me, “You say that the mushroom speaks to you, but I do not understand exactly how this works,” and I said, “Well, it’s sort of like it has many faces that it can show, like sometimes it’s like the role that Rod Steiger played in The Pawnbroker.” At that precise instant, Steiger shows up at the table to shake hands with everybody and slap a few backs and then he just drifts off into the recesses of this restaurant. Ralph Abraham, who was sitting across the table from me watching this whole thing and had heard what I said to this woman, reached across the table to me and said, “You see, the mushroom is showing us that it can touch us anywhere, anytime.” Strange stories; synchronicity.

Audience: How do you remember to bring back what you’ve learned?


Audience: How do you remember to bring back what you’ve learned?

That’s a good question, that’s an important question, that’s a key question. Roland Fischer, who was a great psychedelic researcher with psilocybin and later retired to Mallorca to be Robert Graves’ next door neighbor, coined the phrase “state-bounded.” This means that you can’t bring it back. I’m sure you all have had the experience of dreaming, being caught up in some incredible dream with strange people, foreign countries, exotic costuming. The alarm goes off and as you stagger out of bed this is just melting like an ice cube in a blast furnace. By the time you are out of bed and fully dressed you have nothing, not a shred, not a hint, not a clue, it’s absolutely gone. This is a state-bounded memory. Chemically what is going on is apparently that short term memory transcription is just not occurring. You are having the immediate impression of these things happening and then it’s not going to disk, so to speak, it’s just lost.


The dream is not truly lost in that situation where you wake up and it melts away. The proof of this, and I’m sure you all have had this experience is that you go off about your daily business and then there will be, almost always by coincidence, an image, a chance phrase, a view of a street or something, and it will cause you to remember the dream. Once you get a hook into a portion of the dream, if you then work on it, you can probably bring a lot of it out. How this works in psychedelics is that I have an insight or something that I particularly want to remember, first of all, I will say it aloud. This is strong imprinting. Then the real imprinting is to repeat it a few minutes later, and then a few minutes later again. If you can carry it over a number of minutes to several different levels it won’t leave you. A very useful shortcut for this is a tape recorder, where if you play the tape of the trip back after the trip, just a phrase spoken will set off a chain of associative recall and you will retain it this way. To my mind, what shamanic training must really be is mnemonic training. If you want to bring stuff back you have to train yourself to bring it back.


Now, this state-bounded thing: it’s important to notice, we talk about how dreams are state-bounded, how psychedelic experiences are state-bounded, but what we fail to notice, usually, is that ordinary reality is state-bounded. If I were to ask any one of you, “What did you discuss with the person you had lunch with yesterday?” it’s probably very touch and go to actually put this together. I had lunch yesterday with Richard, we discussed his television transmission system, but that was new to me and therefore easy to retain, and also Richard and I haven’t had thousands of hours of conversation together. The person we are most familiar with is ourselves. I don’t know if it works for you like this: I am, let us, say cleaning my house, vacuuming, doing dishes, making beds, and I’m all the time thinking. I understand why Rome fell, I realize what I said wrong to somebody two weeks ago, I recall a telephone obligation that I have to fulfill, I think about things that happened years and years ago, and then the doorbell rings, I go to the door and there’s someone there. They say, “What are you doing?” and I say, “Nothing.” This is because the ordinary state of consciousness is highly state-bounded.


One thing these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life. Most of it is just like a river flowing by, and every once in a while we check to see if the river is still flowing by, but we don’t attempt to retain it. Memory training is great psychedelic training, and of course, as I’m sure you know, there were arts of memory in the past. We are very poor memorizers because we rely on technologies to do it for us. People in the past had all kinds of technologies for allowing them to remember things. For instance, the most common one in use in late antiquity and up through the Renaissance was the memory palace approach. This is where you think of a place you know well — a school, a hospital, a cathedral, a university, but big — and sit and think about it, think about how it looks as you go through the main doors and then what you see when you turn to the left and what you see when you turn to the right. Learn this building until you really can command it with reasonable vividness in most situations. Then if you want to remember something, imagine yourself walking through the front door of this building, turning to your left, and there near the water fountain you will place an emblem of this thing that you want to remember. Then you will go down the hall and around the corner, and by the fire extinguishers you will place another emblem of the next thing you want to remember.


The act of remembering this long list of things is the act of mentally moving through this imaginary building. When you come to the water fountain, the clue will be there, when you pass the fire extinguishers in your mind, the emblem you place there will be there. I know this sounds highly unworkable and unwieldy, but it actually is extremely workable, and people like Catulus and Cicero, the great late Roman orators, were able to speak for hours on end with lists of virtues and vices and interconnecting causes and this sort of thing, because they were masters of this mnemonic memory palace technique. Well, psychedelics are this vivid. This is another one of these things like mantras and yantras that works on psychedelics. You can do this so that when you’re on a psychedelic and you have an experience that you want to remember, place it in your memory palace, and the next time you come past that point in your memory palace this thing will be there.


If any of you are interested in this, the last word is The Art of Memory by Frances Yates, who was a wonderful woman, a great scholar of Renaissance magic. The final trick is to make the image extremely vivid, so that for instance, if you’re about to give a speech to your collegium on the seven deadly sins, one of these sins is lust. I chose the easy one because I can’t remember what the other six are; shows you where my problem lies. You don’t just place the word “lust” in the memory keeping spot, you place some vivid and shocking image. Yates suggests the image of a nun lifting her skirts. I think this was a classically suggested one that people were taught to use. Then when you come around the corner and meet the nun lifting her skirts you think, “Aha, lust, that’s the first one,” then you go on, and so forth. Some of the most astonishing products of the medieval engravers’ art are these books of what are called “emblemata.” Emblemata are surreal juxtapositions of things, animal parts and bodies and machines, that are memory emblems, made as grotesque, surreal and bizarre as possible in order to make them unforgettable. That was the technique, and the surrealists used this very consciously. There is something about the unexpected, the grotesque and the surprising that is almost by definition memorable, and this will work very well in the psychedelic state as well.

Audience: I’m interested in the legal aspect of this thing. We’re talking about something that is highly illegal. As far as the law is concerned, how do you handle it? Anybody that drives around with the license plate “NNDMT,” I wonder, are you paranoid about that?


No, I’m not paranoid about it. If they wanted me they should have come a long time ago, because I was much more vulnerable then. I’ve sort of covered my ass. Naturally, if you speak about these things you can’t do anything particularly illegal. Perhaps I’m foolish, in the sense that I shouldn’t be worried about being arrested, I should be worried about being shot. If that’s how they play the game then I’m in big trouble, because they’ll just come and shoot me, and you too, if you get into this; but if we actually have a legal system that works, then this is called advocacy, and it’s not a crime. It’s an exercise of the First, Fourth, and a couple of other amendments to the constitution. Henry David Thoreau, you don’t get more American than that, said, “If you are right, you are a majority of one,” and we live by majority rule. I don’t feel heroic. It’s not false modesty or anything, I don’t feel heroic doing this. This is really humdrum to me; I just could not behave any other way because of what I’ve seen. This transcends laws, all that is seen as preposterous. I believe in universal laws: you shouldn’t kill people, you shouldn’t lie to people, you shouldn’t inject yourself between lovers. Most cultures recognize a set of universal laws, but, “Thou shalt not smoke marijuana?” Surely the God of Mount Sinai has better things to do than worry about that sort of thing.


We have to create a new option. All social progress is made by people taking chances. If I am an anomaly, some kind of dangerous sociopath, then my message will be swamped and lost in the noise of the tumult of the world, because there are thousands of messages out there. If, on the other hand, this is a great and important domain of truth, then they are crazy to try to repress it because it cannot be repressed. They have tried to repress it.

Audience: Why did they seek to repress it? If the use of psychoactive drugs is so good for the psyche, why have they sought to repress it?

They sought to repress it because there is something in the Western mind that gets very nervous when you try to talk about the bedrock of ontology. McLuhan talked about this. He met great resistance, and all he was saying was that print had created certain kinds of unconscious biases in society in favor of uniformity and linearity. He was amazed at the violence of the reaction against this. He concluded that those cultures that have evolved from the phonetic alphabet are so removed from the stuff of the world, as opposed to languages like Chinese or Mayan where there is a retention of the image in the written language. The cultures descended from the phonetic alphabet are extremely paranoid about questions about the nature of reality. That’s what this is really about.


The psychedelic issue does not relate to the drug issue at all. In fact, it’s important to make this point: drugs and psychedelics are not two members of a family, they are antithetically opposed to each other. The pro-psychedelic position is an anti-drug position. How can this be, since we are accustomed to thinking of psychedelics as drugs? Well, it’s like this: what is it that we object to about drugs? I think most people can agree that we do have a drug problem. If you live in the inner cities you see people getting all twisted up behind this stuff. So what is it about drugs that we find problematic? I think that what is objectionable about drugs is that they cause unconscious, obsessive, destructive to self or other behavior. Unconscious, obsessive behavior is intolerable, because we are conscious people accustomed to injecting choice and meaning into our lives. You cannot have meaning if you do not have choice. This is why we don’t have to spend any time at all talking about whether the world is predestined, because if the world is predestined, then I’m not saying what I’m saying because it’s what I want to say, I’m saying what I’m saying because I can’t say anything else. You’re sitting there because you can’t not sit there, so it makes the world very dull and uninteresting. Compulsive, unexamined, obsessive behavior is the quintessence of antihuman behavior. It was Ludwig von Bertalanffy, the founder of General Systems Theory, who said, “People are not machines, but in every situation where they are given an opportunity to behave like machines, they will so behave.”


Then there are drugs which reinforce obsessive, unexamined and self-destructive behavior patterns. Well, what do psychedelics do? They destroy behavior patterns, destroy cultural assumptions, completely hold everything up for grabs, completely throw open the possibility that reality could be any number of ways that are not culturally sanctioned. In that sense, the psychedelics are almost the answer to the drug problem. The early use of psychedelics reported spectacular progress with alcoholism. The people who believe that alcoholism is a disease — and I don’t follow this literature closely — it seems to me that this is a preposterous statement. You mean a disease like influenza, smallpox and AIDS? Alcoholism is a disease? Can you get it if you don’t practice safe sex, or do you have to wash your eating utensils? It isn’t a disease, it is a failure of self-image. The reason LSD, in many cases, had a tremendous impact on alcoholic behavior was because it just showed people what they were doing. It said, “This is you. You’re a drunk! You’re a burden to your family, a bore to your friends, you smell bad and you’re useless! How do you like it?” So you say, “I don’t like it,” and it says, “Then stop drinking!” That’s how psychedelics cure addiction. When we talk about addiction, nobody ever talks about what is called self-restraint.


Audience: There’s a new book that came out about a month or two ago that’s incredibly controversial. The man takes the position that for the last 30 or 40 years we’ve seen alcoholism as a disease, and that’s just more bullshit from the medical model, and that we need another alternative. Of course AA is up in arms about the book. It’s called Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease, and he discusses the fact that essentially it’s a rationalization to say that alcoholism is a disease. There are certain people that have certain chemical reactions to alcohol, but they are in the minority. This is very important to me because this is work that I am interested in, and alcoholism has also touched my family, as it has a lot of families.

In the disease model there’s no responsibility involved. AA’s position, their goal, is not to understand the nature of the universe; they’re not in the philosophy business. They are trying to get people to stop drinking. So to maximize that goal, I think that they go far overboard. First of all, all substances: they say, “If you are an alcoholic, then you must forswear everything.” I don’t know how they relate to tobacco, but what you’ve got to understand is that we are set up for addiction. It’s just like language and cognition and all of these other things. We are the animal which addicts; other animals don’t addict. Addiction is a way of relating to the world. We not only addict to drugs, we addict to each other, to chunks of territory, to behavior patterns. We attach to everything.


It’s very real, it’s physiological. I remember that years and years ago a woman left me for a homunculus, and I was appalled. I was vomiting every four hours, could not sleep, would burst into tears in inappropriate situations, of which there were many in my life. Heroin withdrawal cannot be worse than that, I mean, are you kidding, vomiting every four hours? Then one night, in the middle of the night, I was just frantic, because when I was awake I felt like I wanted to be asleep, when I should have been sleeping I couldn’t sleep. I was just dragging myself to classes, I thought, “This is crazy, I should turn myself in, but they don’t have crisis centers for broken hearts. What are you going to do?” So then in the middle of one of these bouts, I went to the medicine cabinet, and this woman who had left me had left all these pills there. I sorted through all these pills and came upon a small bottle of tranquilizers, a very mild tranquilizer like valium or something. Well, I had never taken valium, so I said, “I’ll take half.” I took it, and a few hours later I went out to breakfast and somebody sat at my table and said, “How are you coping since Hermione left you?” and I said, “Who?”


It really gave me respect for tranquilizers. I was appalled that something so real to me, so much me, half a tab, I didn’t care. Let ‘em go. I realized that this is how all the people around me deal with emotional crisis. Nobody wants to feel anything. The moment that an unpleasant emotion rears its head, people go take valium or something else and cut themselves off from feeling. We addict to people, that’s the point of that story, and when they leave us suddenly it’s just like having your heroin taken away and you become a mad thing for months, years sometimes. I mean, I still vibrate from this event and it was 15 years ago. We addict to territory. This is war: our turf, our land. This arises as again a consequence of agriculture. Before agriculture, nobody had land, land was something you walked around on as you migrated behind your herd. Once it was cognized as an object and fixed upon, they were ready to knock the other guy’s brains out for setting foot on your territory. We all do this. We are addicted to caffeine, money, sugar, praise, television.


This is a favorite one to talk about because television is a forerunner of very insidious drugs to come, it’s just the crudest and the first. Imagine if, after World War II, a drug had been introduced into this country of right-thinking, hard-working, decent Christian people, such that 20 years after its induction the average American citizen would be spending 6.5 hours per day involved in this drug. That’s the figure for television consumption in this country: the average American watches 6.5 hours per day of TV. It is an electronic drug. It is an obsessive behavior pattern, an unconscious behavior pattern, and a physically destructive behavior pattern. I mean, it’s done more for the rebirth of hemorrhoid specialists than any other single force in our society; but people say, “That’s not a drug, that’s entertainment.” 6.5 hours per day of entertainment? Before electronic media a person could regard themselves as a great patron of the musical community if they heard twelve live musical performances a year when they would go to a theater. How many experts on Beethoven in his generation or the generation following heard the Ninth Symphony more than several times in their intellectual life? You have to get a lot of people together and cooperating to perform the Ninth Symphony. To us, the Ninth Symphony is an object: listen to it, listen again. We are able to objectify experience and then addict ourselves to it. Is this bad? How can it be bad if it is so written into us? I don’t think it is bad; I think what we have to do is choose our addictions, choose our behavior patterns. One can choose to be addicted to punctuality. I am accused of this; other people are addicted to always being late. One can be addicted to meaningless sexual encounters.


I think the physiological end has been much overplayed. Should we not fall in love because we pheromonally lock together with this person and become a single unified set of drives and goals? The physiological aspects of addiction have been, I think, very strongly overdrawn. I smoke cannabis every day at most opportunities, and have for years and years, since I was 18 years old. Every once in a while I stop, just to see what that’s like. It’s trivial; it’s utterly easy. All that happens is a shift in behavior patterns. I read more: that’s what happens when I stop smoking cannabis, and yet I’m supposed to be breaking out into cold sweats, wandering aimlessly through the streets of the city staring up at lighted windows. I think we give each other too much permission to be weak in this area. What is never talked about in talk about addiction is self-restraint. For heaven’s sake, just take hold of yourself. If you tell people that addiction is a disease, addiction is because you’re black, it’s because you’re poor, it’s because you’re this, it’s because you’re that, you have just given them a whole bunch of reasons not to take responsibility for their own situation. What is needed in these addictive situations is the shock of recognition.


I believe that if you don’t take drugs, you’re unbearable. I can’t think of a society on earth where people don’t take drugs that any of us would want to have anything to do with. Let’s take Calvinist Geneva, say. I imagine that as an example of an environment of moral rectitude. These people did not wear bright colors, didn’t listen to music, never drank coffee, never smoked, forget about alcohol, sex is for procreation, so forth and so on. They were paradigms of the male ego frozen in place: didactic, paternalistic, all-knowing, filled with hellfire and damnation. Everything is seen in terms of a moral dimension that makes impossible demands on the human animal. Rather, I think what we should realize is that somehow our evolution into a civilized self-reflecting being is caught up in these synergistic relationships that our conscious mind has with various things in the environment, so that we should choose our addictions.


Notice that addictions to natural substances are harmless. Let me name some natural substances that you might disagree with me on this point. I think probably the strongest one would be opium. People will say, “What about opium? Surely, this is the scourge of mankind.” Actually, opium was never a problem in human populations until it was conceived of as a problem by British colonial policymakers who decided that they could manipulate the opium trade to get an entree into China. Alcohol was never particularly a problem until the discovery of distilled alcohol. Of course, heroin is distilled opium, morphine also. Sugar is a refined vegetable substance. In every case, it has required the intercession of science and technology to take harmless habits and turn them into dangerous addictions. Everybody has a solution to the drug problem. I think what I would suggest is something called the Vegetable Drug Act, where you just say, “If it’s a vegetable, it’s not a drug.” This was the position until very recently with British common law; in Canada, mushrooms were legal. Mushrooms aren’t psilocybin, psilocybin is a refined chemical. It is technology which allows us to create these super powerful, addicting substances, and there will be more and more of them downstream, you may be sure.


I think we need to think of human beings as hardware, as the computer, if you will, and drugs are forms of software. The software that you run determines the kinds of functions that you can perform. If you run distilled alcohol software then you take on the persona of the alcoholic. I believe that cannabis is probably the most harmless and benign drug around. It carries out this feminizing that I talked about, it lowers the profile of the male ego. Instead of wanting to duke it out, people just say, “Well, if that’s your thing…” I mean, that practically boils down to what we call tolerance. So I think that this disruption of our relationship to psychoactive plants is what set us on the long, hard downward path into neurosis. It began with agriculture, with the narrowing of our spectrum of plant awareness from many plants down to the rye, the oats, the barley. It’s interesting that then out of this came the cultivation of beer, which preceded wine. That comes out of the fact of having created surpluses, because the way beer was discovered was through the fermentation of grain that was stored. If you didn’t have surpluses you would never discover the psychoactive properties of fermented grain.


In Nepal, the Newari people have an alcoholic beverage that looks like a bowl of granola when it’s put in front of you. It’s dry; they pour it out of a sack into your cup and you say, “This is beer?” Then they come along with boiling water and pour it over it, and then you get this foamy, lightly fermented, contaminated grain water. To my mind, that is clearly how fermentation of grains and production of alcohol was established. Notice that it was also the accumulation of surplus from the agricultural adaptation that creates the need for defense, because now you’ve got a surplus and you have to guard your surplus from everybody who doesn’t have any. The other thing that the creation of surpluses caused was the invention of barter and money, and this sort of thing, because now you have something that you can trade for something that you don’t have. All of these adaptations; also, a nomadic people cannot move a grain surplus with them. If you’re a semi-nomadic people, a people like in the Amazon, they plant things and then they leave them and go away. They have a yearly peregrination and when they come back to that place a year later there’s all this food ready for them.


Imagine a nomadic people who were doing that kind of quasi-agriculture with cereal and then there’s one year of great weather and great rainfall and when they arrive at their little wheat patch, so much wheat has been produced that they can’t move it, they can’t take it with them. So then they say, “We have food now, we don’t have to keep hunting, so let’s spend the winter here,” and this interruption of the cycle of nomadism to deal with unexpected surpluses obviously spawned the idea in people’s minds, “Wouldn’t it be great if we had surpluses every year!” Then that says, “That won’t happen if we are as careless as we have been about our sowing and harvesting, but maybe if we’re very careful and till the land, carefully plant and do careful weeding, we’ll have to stay here and weed, but then we’ll get this tremendous payback in the end.” To my mind, the invention of agriculture broke our relationship to the wild plants and the lowered profile of the male ego and set us on a path of defending wealth, creating fortifications, supporting more specialization, larger populations, so forth and so on, and from there to the present predicament it’s only a moment.


I think that now things are very far out of hand, and we are caught up in the endgame of history. We are going to have to create a way out of this impasse that is probably going to mean a complete redefining of who we are and how we relate to each other, and space and time, and life and death. It appears that technology is now the thing that is guiding us forward. We are not being lead into the future by politicians. Politicians are running frantically along behind the wagon of history, trying to jump onto it. What is pulling the cart is technology. I think that technology is the program of realizing the practical concerns of the imagination, and that really where are headed is the imagination: it’s a place. I don’t know whether it’s in solid-state circuitry, or the in the bones of the planet, or in artificial archeologies in deep space. The future will figure out the details, but we are close enough to it now that we can anticipate it. It’s what the shamans always said was possible: a world of value and meaning lived in the light of nature.


I think that if we can get through this narrow neck that rationalism has imposed upon us, and overcome these poisonous, paternalistic philosophies, we will return. That’s why I call it the archaic revival: it’s the myth of the eternal return. History is something that you finish with as quickly as possible and then return to the archaic mode of eternity. I think that’s the adventure that we’re all caught up in, that’s the agenda that the plants and the planet have always had in front of them. It’s just that we wandered away from an awareness of what was happening by deluding ourselves with our own inflated self-image: man as master of woman and nature. This distorted part of our self-image has now become so dangerous to us that we have to abandon it, we have to draw back from it.

Under that kind of pressure, I think we will. Harking back to another question, the reason I do this, and the reason I don’t feel any great trepidation about it, is because I believe that historical momentum is with us. This is what is destined to come to be. We are going to take control of who we are by taking control of the physiological and psychological foundations upon which the self rests, and that means the chemical reengineering of ourselves into the state of Edenic innocence that was lost when we set out on the long trail of the sword and the hoe. That’s it. End of weekend.


Thank you very, very much. It’s a political point of view, you see, and as a practical matter there’s no better way to succeed in politics than to champion the most out-of-it point of view. We live in an era where beige fascism is apparently the rising rule of the day. Well, that means that if you want to be on the cutting edge you have to embrace something very akin to psychedelic anarchy, the absolute antithesis of the fascist state. Then you will participate in the turning of the tide and the vindication of this point of view; and it will be vindicated, there’s no doubt about it. All other points of view are bankrupt on the face of them. End of footnote.

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Ethnobotany and Shamanism - Psychedelics Before and After History

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1988

California Insitute of Integral Studies

1795

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Gaia, Eros, and the Archaic Revival

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24 August 1989

Ford Theatre, Los Angeles, California

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Live at the Hollywood Bowl

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24 August, 1989

Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles, California

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aka Psychedelics and the Feminine

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June 1989

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ecstasis that the time wave gets about a minute -- about three seconds because they say, "Look at this." You say, "Oh, wow! That’s amazing!" Then, they say, "My God, but look at this." "But, look at this!" And each one of these, your amazement is genuine and your reaction is correct. You are being shown the most amazing things you’ve ever seen. It’s simply that you cannot retain what they are. So, the goal is, first of all, to be there, to know about it and to draw strength from the evidence for magic. But, then the higher calling is to be a hunter. To find something, to bring it back. If that’s a little too meaty a metaphor for you, well then think of yourself as a noetic archeologist. We want to bring back an object: a flower from hyperspace, a machine from another world. Apparently, the easiest things to bring back are ideas. And so, we have to pay a lot of attention because ideas can cross the barrier - very little else can, but if we pay sufficient attention, I think all -- much of these ideas can be brought across and we can bring -- nothing is unfair. I mean, computer graphics, voice operated tape recorders, uh, anything that works and this is -- we’ve hit the main vein of ideas out there in hyperspace and the goal is to just fill our knapsacks as full as we can and then get back to base with this stuff. [audience laughs]

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aka A Psychedelic Point of View

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June 1989

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6456

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aka The Evolution of a Psychedelic Thinker

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June 1989

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10638

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A Survey of Shamanic Options

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June 1989

Unknown

10404

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Psychedelics and the Chaos Revolution

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22 June 1989

Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California

9143

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Esalen Scholar In Residence (aka Enough is Enough)

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June 1989

Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California

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Shamanology of the Amazon

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1989

Ojai Foundation, Ojai, California

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History Ends in Green - Gaia, Psychedelics, and the Archaic Revival

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Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California

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Shamanism, Symbiosis, and Psychedelics Workshop

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1989

Whole Life Expo

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Opening the Doors of Creativity

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20 October 1990

Port Hueneme, CA

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Question: You spoke about science being in the realm of ego and art and shamanism being in some other realm [couldn't decipher]. My own psychedelic experience convinced me of the insistence of that other realm, but I felt not enough sense of personal power to be that antennae that you're saying that artists can be for bringing that other, until I became convinced not only of the existence not only of me but then the other realm and the other realm within me, and perhaps the psychedelic experience prepared me for that second awareness, but I guess you could comment on how, if possibly--if possible, that second awareness could become more easily accessible, and st...

Q: Um, being aware that the other realm is something that's also very personal and ....


Q: Um, being aware that the other realm is something that's also very personal and ....

Q: Hello Terence...I've known you for a long time, but you've never met me. I'm one of Roy's night people, and, uh...I guess, I don't know, I guess I ought to prep this remark by saying that I got about a $50,000 education and three degrees, college degrees in psychology, but I've never learned anything like I've learned from listening to Roy's show [audience applause] on KPFK [rest of comment indecipherable].........Uh, in pursuing those degrees, I've decided to learn a little bit about it hands-on, so I went to work in [couldn't decipher]. So, it's my misfortune, actually, to be earning my survival at this time to be working as a.....I would like to see psychology take a different direction, and I know that what you're talking about provides a focus to a direction for psychology to take which I think would...blow the lid off things. So, we're really close to, uh...I mean, I'm in total agreement that Freud and Jung discovered the [couldn't decipher]-conscious about a hundred years ago, but they discovered it 900 [couldn't decipher] in Santa Fe.

Um, how do we get closer to this in this kind of society, uh, that's the first part of this question...I'm a little bit nervous speaking in front of all these people. But, um, the second part of this question has to do with a study that you spoke of in '72 where with single-dose administration of LSD, alcoholics were achieving a 72% success rate, and, uh, I would you like you to speak a little bit on the pro-psychedelic, uh, the pro-psychedelic approach being and anti-drug approach

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The Light at the End of History

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14 October 1990

The Wetlands, New York, NY

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The World Could Be Anything

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July 1990

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We closed last night, or we discussed yesterday, a bumper sticker that I saw driving down here, and the bumper sticker said, uh, “Man thinks. God knows.” And, then, someone had bought a second copy of the bumper sticker and cut it apart and reversed it and put it under it, so it said, “Man thinks. God knows. God knows Man thinks.” [Audience laughs]

Now, it seemed to me there was a lot going on in [audience laughter] what was attempting [Terence chuckles] to be expressed here. First of all, something about God, that God knows, that God exists in a superior state of intellection. Plato said, "Time is the moving image of eternity." My notion of God’s cognition is simply the regarding of all points in the spacetime continuum with equal clarity. God knows. The limited program of knowing is thought, cognition. Man thinks. This is what man can do in imitation of the all-knowing and omniscient example of God. But, implicit is that this is somehow in a- a limited undertaking, this thinking of man. And some of you may recall the famous comment of Pascal that, "Man is a reed bent by the wind." And then, Pascal added, "But a thinking reed."


So, then, the second half of the conundrum was that, “God knows. man thinks.” Now this, I thought, was very interesting, because it seems to imply a relationship between the limited project of knowing, which is human thought, and the completed project of knowing, which is omniscience. God knows Man thinks. In a way, what this is saying, is that God knows that man is making his way toward God. God knows man thinks. God knows that man is participating in the same project of being, that God regards from this higher dimensional space. And, so, then, this meditation on these four lines closes with a recurso which returns you then to this realization that what we are talking about is 'the project of knowing', Heidegger called it, carried out on two levels: on the level of omniscience and on the level of limited being.

So, then I th-- meditated on this after we discussed it yesterday, and I thought tonight it might be interesting, then, to [takes drink] talk about the thinking project of– that is the essence of humaneness on one level – the thinking project which has as its vector, um, I call it 'concrescence' following Whitehead's Neoplatonism or one could call it "God." Teilhard de Chardin called it "the Omega point." But, the, the, the, um, process by which knowing transforms itself from, uh, some kind of k- aboriginal, uh, apperception of the possibility of God into union with God, and the process that lies between these two points, is the story of the evolution of human consciousness, or more properly speaking, human history.


And, the interesting thing, I think, about, uh, the Western religions, generally, is their insistence on, um, the tangentiality of God and history, that God was something to be realized in the life of each individual, but that there was also somehow a collective drama of redemption, that was stretched out over a very large period of time, and history then becomes the theater, you see, of the struggle between good and evil, for the redemption of the human soul. And, from the modern point of view, or – let’s be more frank, from my point of view [Terence laughs; audience laughs] – this is, uh, primarily something to be analyzed within the context of language, and our myths about it, and its evolution, and its potential future evolution.

So, I -- and this is in my personal life, the, the great mystery to me, because I feel that I’m -- my intellectual style is that of a scientist, and I take very seriously science, and yet my – not only my faith, but my, uh, experience – has led me to believe that the world is not a construction of space and time and matter and energy. That that mapping is, uh, insufficient. That the world is instead some kind of a, uh, linguistic construct. It is more in the nature of a sentence, or a novel, or a work of art, than it is in the nature of these machine models of interlocking law that we inherit out of a thousand years of rational reductionism. That the world only behaves as science says it should when we confine our engagement with it to information that is at a great distance from us, like reading the New York Times every day.


If you read the New York Times every day, few miracles will occur while you are engaged in that activity. Essentially, what is happening is you are getting your cultural programming for the day, all your switches, if any need being- need to be reset by cultural values, are reset at that point, but when we recede into what I call 'the primacy of immediate experience', the, the rules and models that we’ve been handed by science, and, uh, what’s called, common sense, are just totally found to be inadequate.

And, I don’t mean when we perturb ordinary consciousness with psychedelic drugs. I’ll speak about that in a moment. But, I simply mean when we go into solitude, when we go into wilderness, when we endure great travail in our lives, or when we put ourselves in extraordinary, alien circumstances, then, it’s as though the membrane between the ego, and... something else, which we could call our guardian angel, or the Jungian unconscious, or the Overmind, something like that, the membrane grows thin, and the world loses its, um, – [snaps] what do I want to say? – its mundane character. And, instead, things previously mundane, begin to become charged with psychic energy. They become carriers of meaning. They become carriers of meaning.


This is very peculiar. A- At a low level, it’s not so astonishing. It’s a kind of a generalized opening to the world, because everything is imbued with significance. That tree, that person, that greeting, that conversation, is imbued with a kind of depth and significance that is satisfying. It's like living deeply. Living deeply. But, this phenomenon can proceed to a deeper level of introspection and relationship to the exterior. And, in that case, then, this significance which everything was previously seen to have, begins to concresce or densify, and the world begins to dissolve into animate intelligence.

Now, at this point, um, if you didn’t bargain for this, you're probably very concerned about your mental condition, and if you aren’t, your friends are, because what you’re saying at this point is, the rivers talk to me, the trees whisper in my ear. What you’re recovering is the meaning, that’s all. The meaning that is self-evident in nature, but that we blocked. The meaning is so pregnant in everything that it can actually articulate itself in your native English tongue.

And, uh, you know, talking rocks, talking trees, talking boulders, we define this as, uh, pathology. It means, uh, in technical jargon, a severely diminished ego is in danger of overwhelm-ment by, uh, material from the inchoate and disorganized unconscious. Well, but what’s actually happening, is that, for the first time in somebody’s life or experience, they are meeting the resident meaning in reality, with its force un-blunted by, uh, conditioning and denial.


And, um, this is some kind of a linguistic process. We and all nature, I think, swims in some kind of sea of signification of which we are in the same way that the amphibians were able to drag themselves out of the primitive oceans of this planet on- into air and exist in a completely different dimension; we, whether grandly or perversely - the verdict is not yet in - we dragged ourselves out of the sea of telepathic interconnected signification that united all life, and we exist, panting and pop-eyed, in this other dimension called History.

Ego awareness, presence of self, sense of loss, anticipation of gain, all of these, uh, dimensions of experience, really, have been added to what was previously the animal Tao - just the howling at the moon Tao of animal existence. And to this, we have added, you know, a dimension of future anticipation: a dimension of regret, a dimension of: how do I make choices? and so forth and so on.

Um, there is not a -- I don’t put a- a moral, uh, judgment on this, but it has to be said, that in the tradition of the West, this has been viewed classically as the "Fall." This is the Fall into names instead of realities, into, uh, constructs of reality rather than reality itself. And this has now been, uh, inculcated into each and every one of us, as, you know, both the glory and the, and the trauma of human existence which is our extraordinary ability to reside in and be in language. [Takes drink]


So, for instance, you know, I’ve made this example before: a child lying in a crib and a hummingbird comes into the room and the child is ecstatic because this shimmering iridescence of movement and sound and attention, it’s just wonderful. I mean, it is an instantaneous miracle when placed against the background of the dull wallpaper of the nursery and so forth. But, then, mother or nanny or someone comes in and says, “It’s a bird, baby. Bird. Bird!” And, this takes this linguistic piece of mosaic tile, and o- places it over the miracle, and glues it down with the epoxy of syntactical momentum, and, from now on, the miracle is confined within the meaning of the word. And, by the time a child is four or five or six, there- no light shines through. They're- they have tiled over every aspect of reality with a linguistic association that blunts it, limits it, and confines it within cultural expectation.


But, this doesn’t mean, that this world of signification is not outside, still existent, beyond the horizons, the foreshortened horizons of a culturally validated language. Well, so then, classically, the path through this has been through use of psychedelic plants, or, uh, some form of ascetic practice, or fasting, or prayer and meditation... whatever, some way of breaking through. And, it is literally presented as a breaking through, a penetration to another level, that culture is an imprisoning bubble of interlocking assumptions, that are like, a, um, a collective hallucination. I mean, I hate to say it because it’s a recursive metaphor, but culture is like a delusion of some sort. Because, it isn’t true, of course. It isn’t true, if you’re, uh, a Witoto. It isn’t true that you came from the piss of the anaconda god when he had to get out of his canoe at the first waterfall. That’s not really true. But, that’s your cultural myth and you live inside it.


Our cultural myths, that the world is made of things called mu mesons and anti-protons is, of course, not true either, but it’s a linguistic construct that we culturally validate and live inside, and these cultural myths give permission for certain things. F- Basically, they give permission to ignore certain kinds of realities. So, our language is uniquely set up to ignore, for example, the suppression of femininity. It’s also uniquely set up to suppress the statistically, um, uh, infrequent. We really have no patience with that. We have an assembly mind mentality. What we’re interested in is that things run smoothly. One can imagine a completely different mentality that cared nothing for statistical norms and only pursued the miraculous. I mean, India, in a way, is that society. They don’t give a hoot for, you know, how it works on the humdrum level, but the alien, the peculiar, the other, the unexpected is revered, adored even.


So, these kinds of cultural values shift. But, now, now, we are in a global culture with the combined understandings of five, six, seven hundred language groups and half that many literatures being poured into a global database where some people are assimilating enough of this to begin to play their part in the creation of, uh, a kind of global meta-program for language. And, uh, I think it’s interesting to talk about the form that this may take, because I see this as our, uh -- this is not our salvation, but, this is the angel of our salvation. If we can transform and remake language, then we can have the conversation that we must have in order to save ourselves. But, we cannot save ourselves until we have a language adequate to the problem that we're facing. And, uh, English just won’t do it because English is a language of subject opposite, uh, subject/ob-object opposition. It’s a language of a past, present, and future, and the kind of world we’re living in is not that kind of world.

Now, toiling in the background, misunderstood and, uh, unnoticed for centuries, have been mathematicians, laboring to create, what they call, meta-language of de- of description, that seem to them very satisfying, to the rest of us, very bewildering. And, a question worth asking is: why is it that this language, mathematics, which we have so much trouble understanding, seems so tremendously powerful when it comes to the description of nature? This is not a trivial question. Why should numbers, in a sense the most abstract quintessence of the human mind, have anything whatsoever to say about the topology of three dimensional space and time? It isn’t clear.


What I believe is happening - and we talked about this last night, generally, in the form of a conservation of novelty throughout the history of the universe, but I tended, last night, to present the universe as a material thing. I spoke of atoms compressing into molecules into organic creatures into thinking beings with civilizations and so forth. But, another way to think of this is a kind of take a spiritual x-ray of the material universe, and then say, "If matter is merely the vehicle of the transformations that we call the life of the universe, well then what is the inner dynamic composed of, what is it that is striving, what is it that bootstraps itself forward, what is it that self reflects?"

Well, I think what it is is it's actually information. Information is some kind of, um, ontological modality that is capable of organizing any system, in which it inhabits, into self-reflection. So, you pour information into matter and you get back DNA capable of making life. But, you know, there is a persistent spiritual tradition backed up by psychedelic and shamanic experience that says that there are also hierarchies of incorporeal and disincarnate intelligence that is nevertheless highly organized.

Well, until the advent of the computer, I think we were just pretty much at loss to form any conception, whatsoever, of how you could have consciousness without, uh, a body. But, e- the computer shows us that you can have large scale systems which have degrees, and then, you know, there's a long philosophical wrangle which we can just stamp as 'for another time', degrees of sentience in operating systems. So, then, it seems to mean that information is the thing which uses matter, uses light, uses spirit, uses whatever it can put its hands on to organize itself into higher and higher levels of self-reflection.


Well, then, to what end? I mean, what is all this? Is it just an innate drive toward totality? Or, is it a process which exists completed in some higher dimensional space and we are somehow trapped in a lower dimensional matrix and we have to go, uh- we have to endure the illusion that it is incomplete? I mean, I don’t have answers for these things; this is the business of theologians, basically, to tell us where we are in this universal machine. But, I think that, uh, what we can do to enrich our, uh, experience and to feed data into our heuristic models, is to begin to think in terms of language as the material that we need to work with instead of, uh, public opinion or matter or even energy. It’s meaning that we need to coax into our lives, number one.

As meaning enters our lives individually, we became- we become more capable of raising our voices, both in joyous song, and in political protest, if necessary. My whole shtick, and the whole shtick of the psychedelic experience, I think, is: reclaim immediate experience. Realize that you out-vote all parliaments, police forces, and major newspapers on the planet, because, who knows, they may be illusions. Complicated phenomenological forms of analysis can be carried out to show that their existence is in considerable doubt. But, if you carry out this phenomenological reduction, you will discover that it reinforces the notion that you must actually exist and be real. So, therefore, you start from that -- that nub of immediate experience and real being -- and extrapolation outward should be very provisional.


I mean, I don’t know, uh, how Buddhism handles this, my- I, I, um, I grant you all a strong possibility of existing, but I’m not nearly as sure about you as I am about me. [audience laughs] And, I don’t think any of you should be any sure- more sure of the rest of us than yourself. I mean, the world could be anything, you know? It could be a solid state matrix of some sort. It could be an illusion. It could be a dream. I mean, it really could be a dream …

So it, uh, it pays to stay on your toes, I think. In practical terms, what does all this come down to, besides that we should speak from the heart, clearly, and with our minds engaged? Well, I th- I think that, remember I said we should see language as the stuff with which we work, rather than matter, and that means, uh, creating a technology of the say-able, making the complete understanding of new puns a national priority on a par with weapons development, it means exploring, uh, the real implications of substituting Finnegans Wake for the Constitution, this sort of thing. Because, what we’re doing, you see, is-is-is pulling the beard of the linear print-heads, who really believe all of this stuff, who really are lost in the labyrinth of the political errors of the last 500 years. It isn’t going- we can’t, uh, overwhelm them by the force of arms, nor should we wish to. Uh, they can actually be teased out of existence, because they themselves feel their position to be so ridiculous.


It’s very interesting how, uh, the way the collapse of our enemy in the Soviet Union has exposed the absurdity of our previous positions. All our previous positions are now exposed as absurd, but n- people don’t draw the obvious conclusion. It must also mean, then, that our present position is absurd [audience laughs]. And, so, it’s tremendously liberating. Our culture is ruined. It’s, uh, it's a disgrace from which we can now simply walk away. Well, then, the question is: into what? And, I believe that our persistent fascination with psychedelic states of mind since prehistory forward has been because, in the psychedelic state, from the, you know, from the very beginning, there was an anticipation of the very end. And the very end still lies ahead of us.

What it is is that our nervous system is in the process of evolving us through a linguistic transformation where language, which at the beginning of the process was something that you heard, at the end of the process becomes something that you actually see. And, this simple shift from seeing to hearing is the key to our being able to finally recognize each other and communicate.


Print and linearity and what’s called 'ear bias' for language is what has shattered our sense of ourselves as a collectivity. A positive way of putting it is to say, it’s also what created the idea of democracy, individual freedom, labor unions, the vote, all of these atomized notions of human obligation and political participation arise out of print. But, so do ideas like that we're all alike, because letters from printing presses on pages are all alike. The idea that products should be mass-produced out of mass-produced sub-units. This is a print-head notion. It could never have occurred to anyone outside of a printing press culture and never has. These ideas have imparted to our existence a tremendous material opulence and intellectual poverty and spiritual uniformity. And, now, literally, we have to illuminate our civilization. We have to take its shoddy, spiritually-empty, Bauhaus skeleton and illuminate it, psychedelicize it, let a thousand paisleys bloom [Audience laughs]. Uh, in other words, release the design process from a commitment to material values. Well, how can you do that, because the bottom line of material values is the bottom line? It costs.

The reason we build in the Bauhaus style, for whatever reason we got into it, we now build in that style, because it’s the cheapest around. And, once you start adding filigrees and changing things, costs soar. How can you do that in a civilization with a cult of democratic values, individualism, and print-created linear uniformity? Well, the only way you can do it is, you have to drop design costs to zero. The only way you can do that is if you build virtually.


This means, you build in an electronic dimension that is added on to ordinary cultural space like an orthogonal dimension. In other words, it’s like a TV that you walk into; it’s called cyberspace. And, in cyberspace things are built out of light. So, it costs as much to build Versailles as it costs to build a hamburger stand, because Versailles and the hamburger stand are just two programs that, uh, look exactly the same on disk. So, what this means is that the previous set of class-created values, based on the acquisition and control of matter, begin to break down. This is already happening in America, on one level, where, you know, to live as a middle-class person is to live on a better level than the mogul emperors ever dreamed of. I mean, what mogul emperor could stride to his refrigerator and see cases of French mineral water [audience laughs], juices from the South Seas , pomegranates from South America. Eat your heart out, Mogul-deli! No chance!


So, um, in a sense we’re beginning to create this leveling, but we have created them by looting the material resources of the rest of the world. Conceivably, it can be created in a virtual space, where we would all, uh, live, in this world, a rather monkish existence. But, you know, there’s that wonderful passage in Finnegans Wake where he says (he’s speaking of the red light district in Dublin which is called Moicane), and he says: “Here in Moy Kain we flop on the seemy side, but upmeyant Prospector you sprout all your worth and you woof your wings. If you want to be phoenixed, come and be parked.” Well, he was advocating death as a solution for life’s problems, so if you want to be phoenixed, come and be parked. Uh, my solution is not so radical. I think if you want to be phoenixed, come and be parked at your local virtual reality arcade. And, then, you can be phoenixed in, in several ways.


Well, some of what I’m saying here, is, uh, is facetious. We talked last night about Stan Tenen’s "wonderful object." For those of you who weren’t here, this is a man, a cabalistic scholar, who has developed a piece of sculpture such that when you illuminate it from a certain angle, the Hebrew letter aleph appears as a shadow. And, then you move the light slightly and aleph turns into bet and then you move the light slightly, and so on. In order, his sculpture produces all of the Hebrew letters as shadows from this beautiful form, which he calls "the lily." And, uh, uh, it ties in with, uh, an experience I had, but, well, first let me talk a little bit more about this "lily" thing that Tenen has discovered.

He also made one for Demotic Greek, which, you know, for those of us who thought it was proof positive that Hebrew was the language of God, this was a real blow to the chest. But, because he did one for demotic Greek, too, and it works just as well -- implying, and, uh, he's working on Arabic -- implying that perhaps such forms exist for all alphabets. And, so then I was thinking about this last night, and I said, "Well, if there’s a sculpture in four dimen- in three dimensions that throws the two dimensional alphabets, then obviously, in a higher dimension, there must be a form which throws into lower dimensions the sculptures that make the alphabet."


So, that means all alphabets, all letters, lead back to a hyper-dimensional surface of some sort which can probably then be described with some kind of weird fractal algorithm. And, so then I thought, 'Wow! This is a pretty Hebraic vision of what’s going on here'. We have the alphabets of local languages being generated from higher dimensional objects that are three dimensional that are then referent to still higher dimensional objects that- through which the light of God’s love passes, scattering out into the radiance of what can be said. And, uh, in a way, this is sort of my vision of the millennium, that we will be re-soared into the Word. You know, the whole story begins in principio et Verbum, et Verbo caro factum est – in princip- in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh. The whole cosmic drama is the mystery of what it is for the Word to be made flesh. Language is seeking to birth itself into the domain of concrete existence. That’s, obviously, what "the Word made flesh" means! And, uh, it seems to me, that if the Word can be made flesh, this implies a reciprocity; It implies that the flesh can be made Word.


And, this brings us back to, what I was talking about at the very beginning of this evening, which is the curiously literary nature of reality. That it’s much more like a- a novel by Thomas Pynchon than it is like an equation by Ilya Prigogine. And, why is that? Is it because, in fact, the flesh is Word? And that understanding this, is the real task of uncovering our spirituality? Somehow, it’s a riddle, it’s a conundrum, it’s a koan. If we could correctly understand this, if the world did not disappear immediately, at least it would roll around in a palm of your hand like a spinning marble as the I Ching promises. It’s something about the recognition of the primacy of the Word, that history is the process of the descent of the Word into concrete expression - I didn’t say matter - and that our relation to this retro-flexive process is an ascent into the Word, a going toward the approaching mystery, and a meeting there, in a domain of unknowability, essentially. I mean, this is the 'casting into being' that Heidegger talked about, this is the ‘going to meet the stranger’. This is ‘the flight of the alone to the alone’, that is the driving force of Plotinus' mysticism.

Well, that’s really all I have to say about that, so [audience laughs], uh, let me see what time it is. How am I doing?

[Other voice: Ques- Question and Answer]

Yes, let’s take some questions, if there are any.

Question: Do you know how to use Amanita muscaria medicinally and shamanistically without killing yourself? [audience laughter]


Terence: I can tell you were following my argument with bated breath [clears throat]. Carefully! Because, it’s dangerous. It’s dangerous because it’s seasonally variable, geographically variable, and genetically variable, and that’s enough variables that you should be very careful with what you’re doing.

Uh, generally, I don’t recommend it. It's v- the attention that has been given to that mushroom is, to my mind, entirely out of proportion to its cultural importance. This is because Gordon Wasson fastened in on it with a tenacious will as soma. He decided that it was soma. Are you all up to speed on what we’re talking about here?

Soma

was this mysterious, ecstatic, hallucinogenic plant that the Rig-Vedas were basically composed about. The major subject of the Rig-Vedas is soma. The ninth mandala of the Rig-Vedas is a paean of praise to soma that exalts it above all the other gods, and no one knows what soma was. And, the descriptions are puzzling. It seems to have been -- it's didn’t have leaves; it had yellow flowers. It grew in mountains. And, they speak of pressing it. It was prepared some way. It was pressed, it was filtered, and then they talk about this golden liquid which they drank.

Then, other people said you have to dry them for months or smoke them over a fire. Again, this is- doesn’t seem to be reliable. So, Wasson went to the grave. He, in his last book,

Persephone’s Quest


Persephone’s Quest

, he referred to Amanita muscaria as the supreme entheogen of all time, which was just a completely wrong-headed judgment, I believe. And, this was from the man who discovered the true psilocybin mushroom cult in Mexico! There was an angle on all this which Wasson completely overlooked because of his bias towards certain languages, and that is that along with all this Indo-European Vedic Hindu material, there was a Zend Avestan literature, based around haoma, the same stuff, same word. And, from there, Flattery argues that, uh, it was Peganum harmala, that it was harmaline, that it was not a mushroom, that it was a higher plant in the, uh, Zygophyllaceae. And, uh, I think, probably, he’s right, actually. It’s a very interesting book. Apparently, uh, w-uh, in the Avestan classical period, no one would have dreamed of having a spiritual experience without resort to drugs. They just put it very plainly. They’re the most ‘matter-of-fact’ people. These texts are fascinating! And -- but, they don’t devaluate it. They say, you know, "Here’s our map of the spirit world entirely based on our drug experiences. And, here are the drugs we use. And, to see these angels, you must use this drug. And, to see these angels, this drug," and so forth.


We don’t really know what these drugs were, because the-the etymologies are lost, but harmaline figures very strongly in all of this. And, of course, harmaline is a, uh, neurotransmitter present in human metabolism. In fact, I didn’t get into it tonight because I was trying to keep it off the biochemistry and that sort of thing, but, this transformation of language from something heard to seen that I was talking about, I believe, is a one or two gene mutation. That’s all it would take.

Because, in the human pineal gland, there is a compound called adeneroglumerotropine [sic--adrenoglomerulotropin), that’s what the enzymologists call it. But, when you show it to, uh, a plant biochemist, he says it’s 6-methoxy-tetrahydro-harmaline. And, so it is! Adeneroglumerotropine [Adrenoglomerulotropin] and 6-methoxy-tetrahydro-harmaline are the same thing. Well, it’s a psychedelic harmine alkaloid similar to what’s in Peganum harmala. It, uh, could be converted to DMT by a simple methylation! Well, a one gene mutation would make a methylation possible!

Attention, consciousness, cultural values, we don’t know how many times since the invention of language there have been significant mutations in the n- in the, uh, chemistry of the nervous system that have created significant changes in cultural programming. I mean, doesn’t anyone find it a little odd that the laws of perspective were discovered less than 400 years ago? I mean, what the hell was wrong with people before that? How can you

discover


discover

the laws of perspective? I mean, I find that not credible for somebody to say that the laws of perspective were discovered. It's always seemed weird to me! It’s as though, uh, you know, there was a shift, a very subtle tweaking of the processing of visual space itself necessary to be able to do that. Yeah?

Q: Um, you had spoken about the Word, and the Word made flesh, and, um, Dorothy Sayers wrote a book called The Mind of the Maker, in which she discusses the Trinity, as, uhm, really an image of what the creator process is all about. And, where the father is having, like, a great idea for a play. He’s the Father. The Son is making the thing happen on the stage, bringing it into the world, and having it ‘made flesh’. And, then the Spirit is the response that you have to that completed product, and how all three of them really beget one another and they nurture one another. Um, and she talks about people who have these problems with scalene trinities where there is someone who, let’s say, may have only the Father, only have a great idea, but be unable to make it into something that's physically real on a stage. And, I wondered if you could pick that up, uh, that story.

Terence: Well, yeah. I mean speaking to it, generally, I think if you think of history, as this kind of a process, Western history, as the manifestation of, uh, the demiourgos, Ialdabaoth, Jehovah, and then you get this middle-declension in the Christos, and then this peculiar and misunderstood promise of the redemption by the Holy Ghost. Uh,

McLuhan