He claimed that the surviving recipes of the sacrament at Eleusis, and there were I think four examples of surviving recipes, all called for the same ingredients. Don’t hold me to it, but I think the ingredients were barley, honey, water, and something else, haisa, maybe. He pointed out that a recipe for beer in Greece would never specify water because you understand that water is part of beer, so he said that these words were code words, and that in Greek the first initial of these four words could be arranged to spell the word μύκης, mykos, which is mushroom, mucus. Part of the Indo-European language family believed that mushrooms are slimy. This is why the word mucus can be traced back to the word mykos, mushroom, Mykonos. Mycenae, in fact, means “the land of the mushroom,” and so the role of mushrooms in generating the religions of early Greece is a completely unexplored area, it’s never been fully thought through.

I mentioned the Argyreia complex in India, that’s the Hawaiian baby woodrose. That’s an interesting one, and I’m always on the alert for these, because I’m interested in unclaimed indole complexes. In other words, why was Argyreia nervosa never utilized by anybody? It’s extremely powerful, you only have to take 8 or 9 seeds, and you don’t have to prepare it at all, you just chew it up and swallow it. How come there’s no cult, no impact on the history of ideas? Well, we don’t know. Those 13 species of Argyreia are spread from India down through Polynesia. It’s called Hawaiian baby woodrose, but it was introduced into Hawaii 100 years ago, it has nothing to do with Hawaii.


The only major complex that I didn’t discuss is the cannabis complex. This is one that is not an indole, and there are many anomalous things about cannabis. First of all, it’s what is called a polyhydric alcohol, the only psychedelic polyhydric alcohol known to science. It’s an extremely old plant. I mentioned last night the relationship of the metaphors of storytelling and weaving and language, and of course hemp is a fiber plant. We find hemp mats that go back to as late as PPNB, Pre-Pottery Neolithic B. At Çatalhöyük there are hemp mats. Well, it’s very unlikely, what with tossing waste from weaving into fires and the oiliness of the seed and so forth, that the psychoactive properties of this thing were not discovered. Cannabis originates in Central Asia, the original species is ruderalis. Then very early in prehistory it divided into the resin race, indica, and the fiber races, and then it was carried across the land bridge, presumably, into North America and that accounts for the sativa variant and so forth.


Herodotus describes, interestingly enough, that marijuana was used for thousands and thousands of years before it was smoked. One of the hardest things to wrap your mind around is the notion that until Columbus discovered the New World 500 years ago no one in Europe had ever conceived of smoking anything. It was a New World cultural practice, and if you read Columbus’ diary of when he landed in the New World, he was amazed. He wrote, “The natives drink smoke.” That was the only way he could imagine it: “What are you doing?” Then, of course, it was less than 100 years before it was a major vice of the sophisticated raconteurs of Europe. Within 100 years of the introduction of tobacco into Europe, tobacco was being buried in the graves of Lapland shamans above the Arctic Circle. So the shamanic nature of tobacco was immediately recognized, even in the European context. Herodotus describes marijuana ingestion as a process somewhat like being in a sweat lodge and then pouring hemp seeds and hemp waste onto the hot rocks and letting it mingle with the steam in this closed space and deep breathing, but nobody ever had the notion of a pipe or anything like this. It’s very interesting for many different reasons, and one is that it’s a new use for the human body, less than 500 years old in European culture. At Non Nok Tha in Northern Thailand, and in other Neolithic graves, they have found long bones, arm and leg bones with burned-out centers, and they don’t know whether this was a marrow extraction procedure or if it was a chillum. A chillum is a ceramic tube, narrow at one end and wide at the other, and you pack it with hash and tobacco and then you hold it and inhale. It may be that smoking was known in Asia in Neolithic times but somehow died out in the preclassical period and had to be reintroduced from the New World.


Audience: Terence, do you want to comment about Amanita muscaria?

Yes, I’m glad you reminded me. Amanita muscaria is perhaps the Old World hallucinogen par excellence, at least in the opinion of Gordon Wasson and a lot of other scholars. The problem with it is that it’s extremely difficult to get a reliable positive experience from it. The reasons for this are complex: first of all, it’s geographically variant, it’s seasonally variant, and it’s genetically variant. So only if you have lived in an ecosystem virtually your entire life and have inherited the accumulated knowledge from the shamanic elders of your tribe are you going to know whether you’ve got a good one or not. Nevertheless, Gordon Wasson tried to argue that it was the ur-hallucinogen, the prototypic hallucinogen of prehistory used by these Vedic peoples who invaded India. In fact, he thought it was soma, and I had correspondence with him about it before he died. I think the soma question isn’t settled and it could well have been a coprophilic mushroom associated with the dung of cows. After all, the role of cattle in Indian religion is very central, and in fact the role of cattle in early religion generally is extremely central.

I mean, you do not get goddess religion in the ancient Near East without cattle worship. Cattle and goddesses seem to go very much together, and on the other hand, the Dionysian-Mithraic complex is a bull cult, and it too can be traced back into time until it’s just lost in remote antiquity. So, yes that’s the Arctic mushroom used by Siberian shamans, and it’s been made the prototypic hallucinogen, because Siberian shamanism was made the prototype of all other shamanism, only because some anthropologists somewhere decided that that would be a good idea.


Australia is again singularly poor in known hallucinogens. I always say in known hallucinogens, because somebody could go out into these places and come up with something brand new, something that we’ve overlooked. This is a great challenge for fieldworkers.

The other thing I want to say, and then I’ll stop for today, is a bit about this issue of synthetics. Are all psychedelics the same? Are synthetics in any way inferior or superior to naturally occurring hallucinogens? If so, why or why not? This controversy began for me as an aesthetic issue. I just felt better about taking plants sanctioned by thousands of years of use, but I didn’t particularly feel that it was a strong distinction. But the more time I’ve spent with it, and the more time I’ve spent with Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphogenetic fields, the more I come to see that I really think there is a very large distinction between synthetic and naturally occurring drugs. It’s not a distinction that you’re going to get a chemist to agree to, or a materialist. As far as they are concerned DMT from a plant or DMT synthesized in a laboratory are exactly the same thing, and as far as they are concerned, a synthetic hallucinogen like, I don’t know, ketamine, let’s give it the benefit of the doubt for the moment. Ketamine and a natural hallucinogen such as psilocybin, the differences do not reside in the fact that one is organic and one is synthetic. I think that these plants take people as much as people take the plants, so that when you have a mushroom trip, you not only are having a mushroom trip, you are contributing to the future mushroom trips of everybody in the future who will take this thing.


In other words, you make a small offering on the altar, and that henceforth becomes part of the setting of the thing. It’s like the notion of the Tao of the ancestors; when you take one of these ancient hallucinogens you are locking into the morphogenetic fields of all the people who ever took it. How else are we to explain the fact that when you take morning glory seeds you are flooded with Mayan imagery of stairstep cities and heiroglyphed balustrades, people dressed in gold and Quetzl finery and all this, or that when you take ayahuasca, even in this culture, there is a very strong impression of the jungle, of jaguars, of rivers. These things are coded into these compounds somehow. It seems to me, without talking about issues of toxicity and pharmacological uncertainty, that the content of the naturally occurring hallucinogens are much richer.

One last I point that I want to make to sum up this geographical survey of what is available is to say that, again, another research frontier is China. There is very little evidence of any use of hallucinogens in China, and yet there are clues that mushrooms were understood, that other plants may have been used, the knowledge of which has been lost. The Cultural Revolution did a pretty thorough job on wiping out this kind of traditional Taoist shamanic data. A very simple way of focusing the problem is to say that there has never been reported from China a psilocybin-containing mushroom, and yet I’ll bet that if a reasonably informed investigator were to go to southern China and spend no more than 2 or 3 months off the beaten path, talking to country people, I’ll bet you could come up with half a dozen psychoactive mushrooms with a history of folk usage, it’s simply that the question has not been asked.


Well, we’re not going to have a clear understanding of the historical development of Chinese thought and institutions unless we know what their relationship to the invisible world precisely was, and I think that the indigenous tradition of shamanism, which then became Taoism, which became the real substratum of Chinese religion while it weathered various late-grafted variants and foreign imports like Buddhism, but that native stratum of Taoistic shamanism hints very strongly that there was psychedelic usage of these plants in ancient China.

A couple of people expressed interest in this week that I’m doing at Esalen, so I might describe it a little bit. It’s quite different from this, it’s an in-depth involvement in the mathematics of the I Ching and then a theory that I evolved out of my engagement with that that has to do with the structure of time and analysis of history as a predictable phenomenon. It has no connection with psychedelics, other than that the entire thing was dreamed up under the influence of psychedelics, but it’s a stand-alone idea. If I am able to control the group, I will keep it quite far from psychedelics except in moments of rhetorical desperation. If you are interested in the I Ching, don’t let the word “mathematics” put you off. I am not a mathematician, and the best mathematicians aren’t either. It’s just a way of talking about it and doing analysis that was very fruitful, so that’s a five-day, from the 28th of this month to the 2nd of December at Esalen. A lot of people will be bringing their computers, there will be a lot of machine implementation people. It will go from Taoist scholars to assembly language programmers, and everybody will have more of a contribution to make than they suspect at the time.


Well, hopefully you turned some of this over in your minds in the time that we were apart. I certainly did, in the sense of trying to figure out what I had missed and whose concerns had not been met. What I came up with was your interest in the specifics of time, place, and manner, which should certainly be covered because it’s operational information.

Talking about the various visionary plant complexes that we talked about yesterday, each one of these things has a style and a set of demands that it makes on its practitioners. If you look at the ethnographic literature you then see how the people who have used these things over millennia have come to terms with them, how they have accommodated themselves to these things. For instance, in the iboga cult of Gabon, what is aimed for is that early on in the involvement in the plant, a massive dose is taken, and they say, “It splits your head open,” and you never have to take very much again, because somehow a creode or a predilection has been created and then you are initiated into this. When you read the ethnographic literature it’s hard to believe how much they say they are taking. There’s a saying in Gabon — Bwiti is what they call iboga — “Bwiti begins at 60,” and that means 60 grams. Even allowing for the fact that they’re using fresh root and you might get a collapse rate of 50-75%, that still means they’re saying that Bwiti begins at 15-20 grams, which from my own experience with this stuff I can tell you is not even a conceivable place to begin. That’s not a strong hit, that’s an impossible hit.


You have to know, pharmacologically speaking, the window of effective activity. Every drug, every compound has a profile which you can imagine as a linear spectrum. Below a certain amount it’s undetectable, above that amount it becomes detectable, first as this CNS arousal that I mentioned yesterday and then as a full-blown psychedelic experience. At higher doses it begins to have toxic effects; all drugs are toxins. People often make the mistake of thinking that if you have a toxic substance and you take half of it, then it’s not toxic because there is no register of its effects, but of course everything is incrementally toxic. Some things are very safe, have a great range of effectiveness well below the range where any toxicity begins to set in; other compounds are active as psychedelics at a level just slightly below the level where you’re going to begin to have toxic effects. So you want to know what the profile is of the particular substance that you are thinking of taking.


In pharmacology, one of the parameters that they establish is an LD50, which is a fairly unpleasant concept which you should nevertheless be informed of. LD50 means lethal dose 50. This means that we have 100 mice and we give them an unknown drug; at the point where half of them die, that is the LD50 dose of that compound. There’s an LD100 and LD10 and so forth. What you want is for the LD50 to be tremendously high relative to the effective dose. Now, the perfect or model compound in that case is of course LSD. LSD is active at the 25 microgram range, 25 μ. A microgram is a millionth of a gram. It’s well below a smidgen. The LD50 for lysergic acid has never been determined. It’s never been found how much it takes to kill half of the test animals, so that makes it a tremendously safe drug if mortality is the only concern. Of course, what most psychedelic trippers eventually realize is that mortality is rarely at risk in psychedelic experiences. What’s at risk is sanity. Being nuts is not as bad as being dead, but nevertheless it can spoil your entire day. It’s very reassuring to have taken a compound like psilocybin, and having become totally convinced that you are dying, to remind yourself that the LD50 is 200 times more than what you took, and therefore it’s impossible, and you merely have to discipline the hindbrain and take control of your fear and then you will be alright.


We’ve talked so much about hallucination here, and always because of my particular bent which I have unconsciously transferred to you we’re talking about visual hallucinations, but all psychedelic explorers should be aware of the concept of what is called a cognitive hallucination. This is a much more insidious phenomenon; this is quite simply an out-and-out delusion. The commonest form of cognitive hallucination goes like this: you take mushrooms, an hour and 20 minutes into it it’s getting mighty strange — this is especially a problem with first timers — and you realize with the force of revelation that you didn’t take psilocybin, you took a poisonous mushroom, and now you are going to die. This is an out-and-out cognitive hallucination which is as real as a belief, but it is not a disturbance in the visual field, it is a disturbance in the cognitive machinery.


A friend of mine had never taken mushrooms and was very concerned about how to do it and got the instructions from me — silent darkness, quiet room, stay sitting — and took them in his room in silent darkness. At about the hour and a half point he realized with a demonic chuckle that I had been kidding, I had been putting him on, and actually had told him to stay in his room because we were preparing a surprise party for him at the bar two blocks down the street. Chuckling to himself with this realization, he showered, dressed, went down to the bar, pushed open the door and said, “I’m here!” and the guy behind the bar said, “Oh, really?” Well, the trip got wilder from there, because in the wake of disconfirmation in one of these cognitive hallucinations people tend to become confused, paranoid and upset. You have to continuously track your mental processes and it’s really good to stick with whatever rules that you’ve laid down for yourself. I actually apply this technique in my own life. If I get to the place where I cannot understand what is happening, I try to think back to the last moment when I did understand what was happening, and then do what I said I was going to do then, having given up on understanding it in the moment.


The practical fallout from this in terms of psychedelic research is what we call the “chained to a tree technique,” which is where you just chain yourself to a tree, and providing you don’t hang yourself with the chain, this cuts down the possibility of doing something peculiar. With psychedelics this doesn’t tend to be a problem, but for instance with datura, the best intended and most together people lose it completely and then come back into it 12 or 24 hours later to just survey the swath of wreckage that they have cut through their own and other peoples lives. I had a friend years ago, a very diminutive, attractive woman who took datura with a couple of boyfriends, waited hours and hours, nothing happened. They finally decided to go to their homes. She walked them down the stairs, said goodbye to them at the top of the stairs — it actually happened in the Haight. That was the last thing she remembered until she came to on the 6th floor of the federal building in the San Francisco County Jail. The charge was assault on arresting officer, and the evidence was the officer’s thumb, which had been bitten off. She was an Antioch PhD in medieval literature, so it happens to the best of us.

Audience: Can’t you eliminate a lot of that cognitive uncertainty by having somebody with you when you do this?


Yes, you can. I’m only speaking from my own experience, and I may have an odd take on it, because God knows, I’m odd, but to my mind the ideal situation is to have the sitter two rooms away, and to have a doorbell or the equivalent, because if the sitter is with you, you start to analyze the sitter. As someone once said to me in India, “Face is index of mind,” and the sitter can just become an existential galaxy of possibilities, because you can read their history, their intent, their most secret thoughts — your belief in what are their most secret thoughts. People are concrescences of ambiguity that you don’t want to get too tangled up with in that state unless you really are ready for the trip to take that particular direction. I don’t know if it was in this workshop or the other night that I mentioned that I recall a trip I took with this English guy; it took me two weeks to get his voice out of my head. It just became like this accompaniment to consciousness, this stream of sort of understated, English upper class gibberish on all subjects, and finally it retracted.


That’s called becoming a victim of the transference. All psychotherapists are aware of this. The transference is when you get dragged into the other person’s system of values or delusions. There’s even a name for this in clinical psychology: it’s called allophrenia. Allophrenia is schizophrenic behavior on the part of normal people in the presence of schizophrenics. This is a real problem. Your friend is put in the place, you go to see your friend to cheer them up, and your friend is not violently insane, but saying strange things, behaving in strange ways, and you, in an effort to relate to them, begin saying strange things and behaving in strange ways, and before you know it, the resident has to break in and escort you to the elevator because you’re causing a problem in the ward. The transference is this phenomenon happening among people who are more or less psychologically healthy, but still it can be very disrupting.

I think the sitter should be there only if there’s a three-dimensional emergency. I like the word “sitter,” because it’s operational, it tells what you should do. “Guide” is not such a pleasing word: this implies control, prior knowledge, hierarchy, so forth and so on. The best guide-sitter I ever knew was a wonderful old guy, he’s dead now but I’m not yet ready to say his name in public, his style was that he read these paperback trash novels. He would just sit down with somebody, give them the stuff, and every once in a while they would fight their way out of this ocean of hallucination to deliver some insight and he would just put down his book and turn to them and say, “That’s nice, now go back to the music.” This guy could get 600 pages in a situation where he was nominally in charge of a dozen people who were tripping. Non-intervention, I think.


Then there’s the question of doing it with another person, meaning that the other person is going to be stoned too, and this has its own pitfalls and ambiguities. If it’s your lover, your sexual partner, then in my opinion that’s probably the best way to spend your time. If it’s not, then the sky’s the limit. You’re going to learn more about this person than perhaps you were prepared to. Sometimes it’s easy, it’s no problem, everybody stays who they appeared to be before you took off, but sometimes the masks just start being hurled across the room in all directions and you don’t know where it’s going to leave you.

My approach, I guess, is one of two extremes. I sort of belong to the sensory deprivation school that says, “Lie down, shut up, silent darkness, music very judiciously, if at all,” and I always do it at night, which some people find strange, but night is quiet, the energy dies down. There is calm and still between midnight and 4 a.m. The other end of the spectrum is someone like Salvador Roquet, who gives you three drugs, plays heavy metal rock ‘n roll, then you get to see the Auschwitz film. I’m not kidding; it is an effort, so far as I can tell, to drive you absolutely starkers. I would not submit myself to that. This same polarity exists in therapeutic theories. Some schools of therapy want you to lose it, want you to weep, lament, rend your clothing, throw yourself on the floor, kick your feet in the air. This is called “getting out your stuff,” or “working through your stuff.” What I find about this kind of thing is that it resonates too long. It doesn’t feel like you’ve gotten clear of it, it feels like you have simply objectified it, but life is an uncompleted puzzle; I could certainly change my mind.


I have never felt that the primary use of these things was to cure what is called in modern parlance “neurosis,” what I call “unhappiness.” It isn’t for that. This may be the influence of Jung in my background. Jung felt that there was no such thing as normality, that the task of life was what he called individuation, and he felt that it doesn’t really begin until you approach middle life. You must leave the 20s behind you, because they are so socially and hormonally turbulent that you’re just basically trying to make sense of it on a day to day basis. Then you settle in and this unfolding takes place. I really assume that we are all beyond neurosis; not that we are not neurotic, but that we all have our own strategies and our own take on our own quirks and peculiarities. The psychedelic thing as tool is more to go beyond the legacy of the normal into the transpersonal or the suprapersonal, and really view life as an open-ended domain to be explored.


I find myself talking to psychologists a lot — because this is where this has been seized upon, because it does perturb the dynamics of the psyche — but for instance, I don’t think you should give people hospitalized for psychotic behavior psychedelics. They are having enough trouble. They are being overwhelmed by the contents of the unconscious 24 hours a day and have no tool to make sense of it. The rest of us can make sense of overwhelment by the unconscious if it doesn’t go on too long. I don’t think there’s any one of us who would wish to take mushrooms, arrive at the heights and just stay there. After 48 or 72 hours, some situation would arise which would cast us into an extreme state of disequilibrium. It’s more like diving. A friend of mine said many years ago, “The yogi,” and sub in “shaman,” “psychedelic voyager,” “The yogi and the schizophrenic dive in the same ocean, it’s just that the yogi remembers to take his tanks along.” That’s what it is: there is this possibility of inundation and overwhelment. Well, let’s return to the matter of dosage and set and setting.

Audience: You mentioned yesterday how you favored organic materials over synthetics. What about taking organic materials and then refining them and narrowing them down, getting rid of all the other ingredients in the plant? That’s our Western tendency, to take something and refine it down and isolate the active ingredient and then take doses with that. Do you see that the natural ingredients in mushrooms, or ayahuasca, or whatever it is, have provided and sort of synergized the active ingredients and made the trip easier or smoother?


Yes, I think so. Rarely in a plant where you have a psychoactive compound will it occur all by itself. For instance, in the peyote cactus, there is mescaline, there is N-methylmescaline, there is anhalamine, anhalinine, there’s a whole family, about a dozen of these things. Similarly, in the coca bush: cocaine, several other -caines and several other active compounds. When you take a plant, you’re getting a broad spectrum of these active molecules that have a familial relationship to each other. No chemist has ever exactly explained to me what’s happening, but I think all chemists and pharmacologists are aware of the fact that natural compounds, even extracted or purified, are smoother than their synthetic counterpart.

I recently had occasion to relearn this because there’s been some amount of experimentation with 5-methoxy-N,N-DMT, which is not like DMT, but it is short acting and creates a profound oceanic emotion, but also in the pure substance there’s a tremendous heart rush in the first 30 seconds. I mean, you just feel like you are in an up-elevator which knows no limit, and just about the time that you figure you’re going to go into some kind of emergency situation, it tends to back off. So recently there has been this material in the underground called “toad foam,” which is actually 5-methoxy-N,N-DMT extracted from the glands of a large southwestern toad. Well, when you smoke that, it too is 5-MeO-DMT, but there is no heart rush and it also doesn’t last as long. It’s much more benign and easygoing.


Even in cases where there isn’t a detectably variant spectrum of compounds present — for instance, in Stropharia cubensis there are really only two active principles: psilocybin and psilocin, and psilocin is the dephosphorylated ester of psilocybin, so they are basically the same compound. Nevertheless, if you talk to somebody who has only taken Sandoz psilocybin, it’s much less animated and interesting than organic psilocybin. The counterexample to this is that when Hofmann synthesized psilocybin for the first time, he gave some of it to Wasson, and Wasson took it back to Huautla in the Sierra Mazateca of Oaxaca and gave it to María Sabina, and María Sabina said, “The spirit of the mushroom is in the little pill.” This story has been repeated over and over again. My assumption is simply that María Sabina was a wily old lady. It’s not writ anywhere that shamans have to always tell you the truth, and I very seriously doubt that the experience is the same, although I’ve never had the opportunity to take chemically pure psilocybin.

The difference between the morning glories and LSD is one of animation and color. The morning glories — I’m talking now about Ipomoea and Turbina, the Mexican species — when you take them there is a flood of Aztec, Toltec, Mayan imagery. It’s just uncanny. You can’t believe it while it’s happening, that you would see this much carved obsidian, glyphs, Quetzl feathers and all of this stuff. Is it the morphogenetic field? Is it the broader vegetable spectrum of the alkaloid rather than the synthetic? Who knows; these things remain to be looked at.


In terms of the theory of morphogenetic resonance — some of you probably follow Rupert’s ideas and Rupert himself — he problem is that the morphogenetic field is very difficult for instruments to detect. So far the only instrument I think that can detect it is the human mind. This probably means that it’s perturbing a field that is very, very far removed from the fields associated with the four or five ordinary forces of nature. But for instance when you go to Tikhal in Guatemala, or Borobudur in Central Java, or Konark on the Puri Coast of India, and you take these psychedelics, the past is present. You see these places at their height, and you can say, “Well, it’s just suggestion,” but I don’t know.

When I take ayahuasca, wherever I take it I encounter the motifs typical of Amazonian shamanism: the jaguar, the giant anaconda. To show you that sometimes the iconography of these compounds is not predictable: black people. Everyone in the Amazon says this, that you see black people. Well, there are no black people in the Amazon, not really. In the Lower Amazon there are a few, but in the Upper Amazon a black person is as rare as a Kurd, and yet everybody insists on this. I have had this experience on ayahuasca, and to call it “seeing black people” is a very mild gloss on what it is. It’s like being at the Apollo Ballroom on a hot evening in 1960 and Aretha Franklin is onstage; I mean, it is a deep hit of blackness.


I don’t know quite what to make of it. I don’t know why, and Claudio Naranjo gave harmaline to urban people in Santiago, Chile — stockbrokers and advertising executives, people who have no connection to the jungle — and they reported jaguars, giant snakes, jungles and black people. This is a tremendously fertile area for Jungians to look into. Psychics have claimed since who knows how long that by holding an object in their hand they could penetrate its past states of being. Well, it’s like all these other occult claims in my experience: mantra, yantra, yoga posturing, past life recovery. For me, none of these things are possible unless I’m stoned, and then they all become possible. It’s like you just throw the switch and suddenly mantras work. I can chant mantras until hell freezes over in an unstoned state. The precondition for empowering occult idea systems seems to be a shift in brain chemistry.

It’s to be noted that in these cultures where a lot of magic, a lot of violation of natural law is going on, there is a lot of psychedelic stuff going on. Among the Aguaruna-Jivaro for instance, a very no-nonsense tribe of headhunting people in the Amazon, the shamans live continuously in a state of altered consciousness. I mean, they are taking this stuff all the time, it is a food item. What would it be like to be the shaman of the Aguaruna in the jungle, all the time taking all this stuff? It’s hard to imagine, because when you just do it once all plants have auras, all plants have songs which can be extracted out of them. They are living, literally, in some kind of other dimension.


Audience: I’d like to play devil’s advocate, if I can for a minute, about this whole idea that certain plants or certain substances have certain attributes or certain places that they take people to. I’ve had the ideation that you’re talking about — the visualization of the snakes, the cats, the jungle, the pyramids, the whole Mayan aspect, jungle and shamanic routine — on LSD, on mushrooms, on ibogaine and on yagé, and I’ve had clients that have had the same ideation doing breathwork.

Yes, this raises a real question. I don’t understand exactly how this works. I will join your side for a moment because there’s a phenomenon that I’ve noticed, and some of you have heard me talk about it. It’s possible to do this on psilocybin; it’s really easy to do it on ayahuasca. Ayahuasca, in a way, is somehow more open to suggestion. These other things have their own agenda; ayahuasca will work with you. One of the bizarre things that you can do on ayahuasca is that you can suggest a period, let’s say Italian Baroque. You just say it in your mind and paintings, altarpieces, architectural spaces, balustrades, vehicles, armaments, saddlery, clothing, serving utensils, bowls, pewter, candelabra, all of this stuff will begin drifting toward you, and it is high Baroque. In fact, it is more Baroque than the Baroque, it’s obviously what they were shooting for. Then you say, “Dynastic Egypt,” and you get a hawk-headed guy. Then you say, “Art Deco,” and thousands of cigarette lighters and coffee tables appear, more intensely realized than when you actually encounter these things in real life.


Well, what does that mean? I have no idea. First of all, the possibilities seem to be that what we call styles or motifs are actually categories in the unconscious, but the amazing thing about it, having looked at the Italian Baroque, Dynastic Egypt, and Art Deco, is that you can also say to it, “Surprise me,” and suddenly it can surprise you, 100%. It can show you objects that you cannot place to any set of motifs, any historical period, past, present or future, and then you can say to it, “Surprise me again,” and it gives you Surprise B, which is completely different from Surprise A and also not related to any known style. So then you say, “Are styles categories in the unconscious? How many of them are there? What does it mean then for a group of people in 1680 or 1930 to suddenly find one of these places and punch into it?” Then another question is, “Is there a necessary historical progression, or is it by chance?” In other words, “Could the political world of the 16th century have lived with the design motifs of Art Deco? Could we have had Columbus arriving in America in a ship consonant with the best canons of Bauhaus design?” Strange questions, friends. “Is there necessary succession in style or are these things pure chance?” I don’t know.

Returning to and responding to your demonic advocacy, it may be that going to Tikal preconditions you and that pushes the button, and then when you take the psychedelic you realize that the high Mayan, the classic Mayan button had been set, and then you find all of this stuff. It’s a little more bewildering to have it happen in your living room.


Audience: My feeling about it is that those experiences are available to anybody in various states, with various ways to get there, and I don’t feel that it is mutually exclusive to say that some substances do seem to have a certain predilection for certain kinds of experiences. I’ve had both feelings about it, that the bandwidth of experiences is available and some things are more likely to put me there than others.

Well, LSD is a relative of morning glories, so if you got Mexican imagery off of LSD that would be understandable. It may be that all the indoles resonate together, and Rupert is fond of saying, “The thing which is most impinging on the present is the immediate and most closely related past,” but also impinging are the related past moments and the related contingencies. Perhaps all of the indoles can access each other. One thing that I’ve done on psilocybin — and you might try this, this is an interesting experiment — once you get it up and running smoothly, then you can say to it, “Be MDMA!” and it will be it, and you can say to it, “Be LSD!” It loves to do imitations of other psychoactive drugs. I don’t think you can say to MDMA, “Be DMT!” and it will move over into that space. You hope not, don’t you? Obviously, it’s some kind of freely commanded modality in the psyche with which we can have a relationship if we will but evolve a control language and a dialogue. It remains mysterious. A point that I made yesterday that I think is worth repeating is that the psychedelic experience is the beginning of the spiritual path. That’s why it’s not important that yogis claim that they can deliver you the psychedelic experience, because it begins with the psychedelic experience and then you go from there.


I said something like this a few weeks ago at the John Ford Theater in L.A., and this guy got up and said, “So why don’t you take more?” which I think is a very interesting question, very valid for me, personally. Our whole lives, we conceive of spiritual development as looking for the answer: is it Taoism? Is it diet? Is it tantra? We look for the answer, and I think we have become so accustomed to looking for the answer that it’s never really entered our minds what it would be like to find it, to have it. Once you come face to face with these psychedelics, the trail ends. You have found the answer. Perhaps because you’re smart, perhaps because you’re lucky, perhaps because you deserved it, perhaps because you hang out with the right people, you have found the answer. Now the question is, “What the hell do you do with it?” because the answer is going to make hash out of your life, because your life is based on living without the answer. Suddenly it’s not, “I want to be an enlightened being, I want to be a shaman, I want to be a Taoist, I want to be a yogi.” Be it; see how you like it!


So the answer to the question, “Why don’t you take more?” is because I am attached, basically. It is entirely my own attachments that now impede my spiritual growth. Nobody is holding me back, nothing is holding me back except my sense of the awesomeness of what is now possible. This is true of everybody who reaches a certain point. Think of the Taoist sage on Cold Mountain who has been up there in the fog and the mist and the rock escarpments for 30, 40, 50 years, and the people in the village occasionally mention him to each other and say, “Is old Fuzhi still alive? Has anyone seen him recently?” and someone will say, “Oh yes, I saw him three years ago across a valley gathering wood, but when I approached he ran further up the mountain and disappeared.” To be Fuzhi is entirely possible, to actually attain what we have previously thought of as unattainable spiritual accomplishment, but I don’t think it can happen without leaving everything. Do you really want to be a Taoist hermit circulating the light for 200 years in a cave, high up above the timberline? You can; there’s nothing stopping you once you understand that this psychedelic vehicle is available. I am appalled at that. I mean, it’s one thing to change your life to be nicer to your coworkers, it’s quite another to change your life to be incomprehensible to 99.9% of all humanity.


Once you have the psychedelic tool in hand, then real choices have to be made. What is this to you? Is it simply something that you do once or twice a year to affirm to yourself that it’s possible? Is it something that you can use in some way for your good and the world’s? That’s sort of where I have come to rest, and I hope it’s not a delusion, but I think that there are ideas out there, and that they don’t do any good out there, that they only have efficacy if brought into three dimensions. There are all kinds of ideas, in fact they are all ideas. So we’re talking about a more efficient internal combustion engine, how people can learn to love each other, how to save the planet, the most efficient way of packing crackers in a box for long shelf life and low destruction of their structural integrity. It doesn’t matter what the problem is, the answer can be found out there. It puts people who are into this psychedelic thing in an entirely different stance from all other spiritual seekers, because all other spiritual seekers are furiously seeking. Psychedelic people are holding it back with all their power because they are in the presence of the mystery, and then the trick is to get a spigot on it so that it can be turned on and off, rather than just coming at you like a tidal wave a mile high and twenty miles wide.


It’s a different problem, an embarrassment of riches, an embarrassment of access to past, present, future, alien dimensions, mantra-hoarding elves and promise-bearing demons. Strangely enough, it creates a certain kind of conservatism. I don’t think that everybody realizes this. Many people take psychedelics in order to prove to themselves that they can, and then gain acceptance from their social group. It’s a way of fitting in. You can always evade the mystery; not always, but if you’re trying to from the get-go you can evade fully confronting the mystery, but if it’s what you want, you will quickly discover that you have hit the main vein, and that changes the rules of the game pretty entirely.

Audience: Some psychologists say that psychedelics will only take you so far, and then you have to do something else, but my experience with it is that that’s not true and it will take you as far as you’re willing to go.

That’s what I think, I think people who quit doing it see something, detect. If you think of the self as a diamond, the psychedelic is pressure on the diamond. You can raise the pressure to 1,000 pounds per square inch and there are no structural flaws, but if you raise the pressure to 10,000 pounds per square inch microflaws begin to show and sheer lines appear, because everything will fly apart at a certain level. One cannot encompass this mystery. I think finally you have to avert your eyes and just — “adore” is a strange word, and “worship” is also a strange word — but certainly give credit to. It is not a program that you finish, and people who say, “I learned all I could from it,” probably learned mostly that they shouldn’t do more of it.

Audience: I think it threatens to put people out of a job, especially psychotherapists.


Well, it threatens to put anybody out of a job, because eventually the contradictions of living in this low-level slice of reality will just become unbearable. This actually happened in the ‘60s, many people quit and dropped out for many reasons, but the seed of all that talk is that you just say, “This is absurd, I am going to sit.” That’s not absurd. But what about your stockbrokerage? What about your portfolio? What about your divorce in progress? I think that the depth of this cannot be taken. Eventually the male ego in every single one of us, regardless of our gender, will feel threatened, because it’s hardly different from death, because you’re not going to recognize yourself. That’s the point that I wanted to make in talking about the guy up on Cold Mountain. Once he ran a gas station, once he followed the Dodgers, but then it all began to slide in a certain direction and he is no longer recognizable to himself.


Carlos Castenada has Don Juan say, “You must lose your personal history.” I don’t know whether Don Juan is a real person or whether he ever said that, but it’s interesting, that notion. How many of us would be willing to become unrecognizable to ourselves? And yet obviously that’s the path that one is on, and so then you just decide, “Is there an obligation to go to the end? Do I have to become a genie? Do I have to become a Taoist sage, an immortal?” and I think the answer is no, one doesn’t have to do that. Buddhism creates the notion of the Bodhisattva, that is in a way this same thing. It’s where you’re just about to go over the hill into incomprehensibility, and then you say, “Wait a minute, what about the people in the prisons, the naked, the hungry, the oppressed?” and you pull back and say, “No, I forswear enlightenment until the last being attains enlightenment.” Well, it’s a noble gesture, but I’ll bet these Bodhisattvas make this vow with a tremendous sigh of relief. Now they know what they’re going to do with their lives: they’re going to work in prisons, or council the dying, or get into political action. “Geez! For a minute I thought I was going to go straight into the light, and become unrecognizable to myself and lose my definitions,” and so forth and so on.


Audience: The two words that struck me were “adore” and “worship.” On Friday night Matthew Fox quoted, “We have come to a point in history where we must either find some form of meaningful worship or commit suicide,” and somehow that quote came back when you mentioned, “When one may reach that point of the penultimate truth, of the unspeakable, or the formless form, or the light,” and the mushrooms are pointing the way. Breath therapy, all these things are only something that points you to the ultimate, and when you get there it moves into the adoration and the worship level. Interestingly enough, coming from a recovering Catholic, I could never find any kind of religious community and I didn’t want to join a monastery for that purpose. What I see is this neurosis or unhappiness that exists in so many people in this country. They have no contextual format for worship, because it doesn’t have that power for them to do it.


You have to have the personal experience of something to worship: this is what has been lacking. What the churches are peddling is high abstraction, and you really have to work yourself up into a lather to be able to accept that as worthy of that kind of attention. The psychedelic subset of society is into an experience, it’s accessible. In a way we’re like Calvinists, not in our ethics or our restraint on behavior, but in our insistence on a direct personal relationship with the mystery. This is something very new. We have really accepted the idea that truth descends through hierarchies, basically from Newsweek and Time and the Washington Post down to us, as consumers of these various images of what is going on. The notion that you might know more about reality than the combined editorial board of Scientific American and the Journal of Foreign Affairs is startling stuff. We always give ourselves away, we don’t realize that it only depends on you. To believe that at Cornell or down at SRI people understand the universe is not helpful. You must understand the universe, and if you don’t know partial differential calculus then your model of how the universe works must do it without partial differential calculus. In other words, it’s not writ anywhere that only one model will work, and in fact I think that all abstract models should be highly suspect.


We have to view life as an opportunity. What are you doing with it? Are you afraid of it? Some people live their lives and apparently what they are doing is arranging their deathbed scene. They want it to take place in a large baronial house with clipped green lawns, acres in surround, they want the room in which they die to be filled with fine art, they want their loving heirs to be dutifully assembled while they pass out the final wisdom, and they spend their entire life creating the dramatic scenario of their passage. Of course you have to work hard, because you’ve got to make the money to buy that house, you have to sire all these children, educate them into your values so they won’t be stabbing you in the back and misbehaving in this situation. You have to create loyalty, possession, power, all of these things and then you won’t die in a ditch, unknown and abandoned; but on the other hand, what was the quality of that life?

Life is an opportunity; how much pressure should you put on it? How many places should you go? How many drugs should you take? How many sexual configurations should you experiment with? How many professions? It depends; the question, I think, is, “How seriously do you take it?” Do you just think that life is a lark and it’s fine with you that you’re going to go into a pine box and be forgotten for all eternity, or do you have some inner consolation that that won’t happen and you’re going to go off and be with Lao Tzu and Mao and everybody else who ever died? Just what is it? I think of it as a telephone booth being filled with water. You can see that when the water reaches the top of the telephone booth you’re going to be dead as a doornail, so you have 30 years to figure it out.


We are alive, there’s no contest about that. It’s extremely improbable that we should be alive, that we should be here thinking, feeling, sharing. The fact that we’re alive throws open the whole game, means anything is probably possible, but I doubt that it’s easy. I’ll bet that you have to be very smart to figure out what’s going on and get it right, so I guess I have a private religion of intelligence. It isn’t how good you are, it’s how wily you are, which was the Greek virtue of Odysseus, that was always his epithet. He was “wily Ulysses.” Reality is some kind of maze, a puzzle garden that you walk through to try to find your way out. It isn’t to the swift that the race goes, it’s to the thoughtful, to the careful, to the one who can tease it all apart. For puzzle solving, the psychedelic is this tremendously powerful tool, because it extends the domain of mind, and that’s what’s necessary to make it go.


OK, moving through these things and discussing dosage, probably in order of the likelihood of your encountering them. Mushrooms: I feel that people who weigh around 140 pounds should take five dried grams. This is a stiff hit. This is a committed hit. There will be difficult moments in a five gram trip, but on the other hand certain questions will be solved forever for you, because you will validate the existence of this dimension, you will see what your relationship to it is. I don’t believe in diddling with these things. People tend to take tiny amounts, thinking that one tenth of a dose is one tenth of an experience. It doesn’t work like that; half a dose can be no experience at all, and a full dose can feel like ten of these experiences, so trivializing it is really, and I use this word advisedly, sinful, because you are trivializing the only mystery. It’s like trivializing sex. The ordinary objections to pornography are not my objections, but to my mind a very strong objection to pornography is that it trivializes, and anything which trivializes anything central to our self-definition is bad mental hygiene. Taking small doses of psychedelics tends to trivialize them. There are people who probably take LSD every weekend and go dancing and have done this for years and have no idea what LSD is capable of.


The main shift in the use pattern with LSD is: it may have been childish, but the style of the ‘60s was, “How many mics can you bolt down?” “Have you had the 500? Have you had the 1,000? Have you had the 2,000?” Eventually it becomes moot because you just dissolve into shimmering atoms for longer and longer periods of time on these trips, but the modern approach, which is, “How little can you get away with taking and still be one of the gang?” is even more insidious, because then people feel capable of talking about these things. There are people who feel that their opinions on the psychedelic experience should be weighed very carefully who have only taken MDMA. Well, listen, I’ve got news for you: that is to the domain we’re talking about like a broken tricycle to a Testarossa Ferrari. So this is a general comment, that you should take a committed dose of whatever it is you’re taking so that there is no ambiguity, because there’s nothing worse than a sub-threshold psychedelic experience. It’s all show and no go: you feel the CNS activation, you feel the keyboards light up, everything comes on, you start down the runway, you pick up speed, and then you come to the end of the runway and taxi back to the hangar. Well, that was not a flight to Boston, that was just clogging the traffic pattern.


So, committed doses. Then, because you’re going to take a committed dose, inform yourself of the medical and pharmacological chitchat on the matter so that you can feel reassured. Talk to a heart specialist, questions like, “If my heart is pounding, does that mean I am having a heart attack? What is a fibrillation and how will I recognize it?” because you can have very odd feelings and not be in any danger whatsoever. Your heart can pound — it’s made to pound, look at all these aerobic exercise freaks — well, the fact that you’re sitting still when this begins to happen doesn’t mean that you’ve been shoved to death’s door, it just means that everything is equalizing and coming to some kind of equilibrium, and you’re passing through a transition. These drugs do have a kind of Mach barrier. In other words, there is a barrier somewhat like the speed of sound. It’s a pharmacological and physiological barrier. So you take the compound, the plant, whatever it is, nothing happens for 40 minutes or so except false starts and little things and you have to pee and then you come back and sit down, and then it begins to come on.


It can have many manifestations. It can be chills, tremoring, knotted stomach, nausea, restlessness, so forth and so on. This is what I call, taking a page from the engineering book, “Q.” “Q” in engineering circles is vibration in a physical system. When they launch the space shuttle, if you listen to the radio chitchat they will say, “Approaching max Q,” then they’ll say, “Max Q, mark,” and then they’re through that. What that means is that as the system approaches a transition it begins to shake, it begins to shake as though it’s going to shake to pieces. The Q forces are building on all the air surfaces, the airframe. Then you break through that, Q falls to 0 and then you’re in the cool, main engine cut off. You are now in orbit, all vibration has ceased, noise has ceased. You are in orbit, you are weightless, you are there. It’s different. Now you shut down all these switches related to the launch procedure and begin to set a course through a different kind of medium, a medium characterized by smooth stillness and that sort of thing. LSD: I don’t see anything wrong with 300-400 micrograms as an initial dose. I don’t see any point in running up into the 1,500-2,000 μg range, because in my experience what happens at higher doses is that there is simply an area where you can’t remember what happened, and the higher the dose, the longer that period of time, but since you can’t remember anything about it, it should be shortened. DMT: 70 milligrams vaporized in a glass pipe.


Audience: I have taken very large doses of LSD at times and it’s always seemed to me that it’s very difficult to process all that’s going on. The biocomputer shut downs for a while, and like you said, I forget.

Yes, it overloads, it just shunts it past you. What do we need to cover here? DMT, psilocybin, LSD. MDMA, which probably you all know, 125-150 milligrams, and because I tell you these doses it doesn’t necessarily mean I approve of all these things. I’m just saying that if you take them, these are the doses. Ketamine: people take small amounts, again usually after attaining some amount of proficiency with it. I’ve only done it four or five times, and always fairly large doses, 130-150 mg. Interesting compound, but contraindicated because of physiological problems. It depresses the immune system, there’s the possibility of epileptic kindling. Certainly, if you were to vomit in that state, you might well strangle because you wouldn’t be able to clear your throat. What I also have against ketamine is that you have to shoot it. As I was driving home last night I was listening to some program and they were talking about intravenous drugs and I thought, “How interesting. That’s a distinction you don’t hear made very often.” They were saying, “We should legalize all drugs except intravenous drugs,” so that’s of course morphine, cocaine, heroin, ketamine, steroids, I suppose. That’s an interesting distinction, operationally.

Audience: You can snort ketamine, can’t you, though?


Audience: You can snort ketamine, can’t you, though?

You can, but I’ve heard that it’s dangerous. When they give it as an anesthetic it’s 600 mg IV push, which must be just like being struck from behind by a freight train. I’m sure you never know what hit you. I mean, imagine an exploratory dose is 100 intramuscular, they are talking about IV, directly into the vein, 600 push, that means pressure on the feeder. So it’s just like a high pressure filling of your gas tank, you would never know what hit you. Now they’ve pulled it from general surgery, even veterinary surgery, because it seems to depress the immune system and the worst thing you could do is to do surgery on somebody and then put them into a surgical recovery ward with a depressed immune system. So that is kind of out.


I must say about ketamine that it did something to me that nothing else has ever done, which is that it erodes the observer in a way that the indoles don’t. On ketamine you can get so out there that it is a major intellectual breakthrough to realize that you’re on a drug, in other words, there’s this situation and it seems like it’s always been there and it always will be there and you can’t remember who you are, or what you are, or where you are. This situation continues, and there’s something about it but you can’t quite put your finger on it, and there’s never been anything else, there will never be anything else, and then suddenly comes this tiny thought: “You’re on a drug!” “Oh, right, I remember now. That’s it! That’s it, I’m a human being and I took a drug. This is a trip. That’s right, I’m on a trip. Now I’ve got it!” Well, what this means is that you’re now coming down because the trip is now over with.

Audience: I had this experience with mushrooms. For hours I had no connection to anything which had any connection to my personality or to life. It was wonderful to be there and to see what makes up our minds, how this world is made up, with all of its structure and architectural designs.


Yes, maybe this is the white light. Maybe this is what these early LSD people were so enamored of, getting so far into it that you don’t even know you’re into it, because you can’t remember where you started from. It’s not what I’m shooting for because I always want to bring stuff back. My belief is that this stuff is important for all of us, that we are in some kind of lower-dimensional slice and what you see in the psychedelic experience actually has historical implications. I find this sort of paradoxical because I’m the person who draws everybody’s attention to the fact that people have been doing this for 50,000 years, so in a way that sounds like I’m saying, “It’s not a big deal, it’s part of the human heritage, certain people have always known about this.”

Audience: The point between when there’s nothing and when the observer kicks in: that’s a big issue in my life, where does the observer come from? Is it an evolutionary thing, like animals never have it when they fade into the white light? Do you have anything to say about that little place in between?


I think it begins with self-reflection. In other words, the question, “What is happening?” I don’t think animals ever ask that question. For animals, what’s happening is what’s happening, but we are capable of creating a state of distance and posing the question, “What is happening?” and at that point in the trip it means that you are making your way back to the modality that you left from, you are drawing away from the translinguistic place — and it truly is translinguistic: nothing can be taken out of it — but at the interface of the sayable and the unsayable is the novel, the new, the never before seen, said or done. I think it’s important to try to bring out ideas because I think we are the animals that bring back ideas. Somehow our hunting and gathering adaptation then set us loose in our own minds, and somebody came back and said, “Let’s throw a chunk of this meat in the fire and see what happens.” It’s this “see what happens” attitude, so then suddenly they discovered that meat burned in fires is easier to digest and tastes better.


By this means, this, “Let’s see what happens,” approach to things, the ideas come in the mental dimension. The, “Let’s see what happens,” translates those of them that can be translated into three-dimensional space. “Let’s plant this plant, let’s slaughter this animal, let’s try sex this way, let’s go over that hill this year instead of that hill.” What has come out of this is the entire legacy of our cultural heritage as a global civilization, but all of these ideas began in the mind. What are ideas? This is the central question of Platonic philosophy. What are we that we seem to separate the doable from the undoable in the realm of ideas? Anything that can be done, we do. It doesn’t matter how perverse, how painful, how destructive, how grandiose, how wonderful, how sublime; if it can be done, we do it. Then, in this three-dimensional domain of space and time, these ideas compete with each other like organisms and an ecology of mind evolves. That’s really what culture is: it’s the ecology that mind has created for itself, in the same way that bees create a beehive and then the beehive is the cultural context of beeness. We have created civilization through language and then civilization has become the context for humanness, and yet we always seek to transcend it and go beyond it.


Now, I don’t know whether this is something innate in us or whether it is somehow programmed in from the planet at different levels. It’s very interesting, I don’t know how many of you are aware of this, but there are leafcutter ants in the tropics, they are a major part of life in the tropics, and they march in columns through the jungle, and they can swarm up a tree and take all the leaf material off a large jungle tree in a matter of hours. What they do with these leaves is that they return, sometimes at great distances, each one carrying like a little banner a chunk of leaf, and they go down into their nests, chew it up and stick it on the wall, and then some of them go back to the surface and gather spores on their antennae, and then they go back down into the anthill and they inject or inoculate the chewed plant material with these spores. Naturally, this chewed plant material is pretty organic and funky, so it begins to grow all kinds of things: molds, mildews, bacteria, so forth and so on. The ants farm this and weed out all these bad bacteria and small microfungi and organisms, and only cultivate this one fungus which then converts the plant material into a usable sugar. This is a symbiotic relationship between the fungi and the ant. The ant is getting an enriched food out of this and what the fungi is getting is a cultivated situation where all its competitor organisms are carefully kept away and weeded out.


This is precisely, in my model, what is happening with the human species at a more complex level. In other words, by domesticating cattle we have set up an environment that is very favorable to the growth and appearance of what would otherwise be a very rare deep forest mushroom, but because we domesticate cattle and clear land we have created a huge circumtropical global environment in which these mushrooms can reside. What they make for us is not sugar but ideas, something we need the way ants need sugar, and these ideas take all kinds of forms and then we refine them. I really believe that human populations that do not have contact with the psychedelic tremendum are neurotic, because they are male ego-dominated. The reason I call it male ego is because women, by virtue of physiology, basically, are pretty unavoidably welded to the nitty gritty, because they give birth, they carry children to term, and those two things are biologically dictated. There is also the cultural dictate that women are usually involved in preparing and burying the dead in traditional societies, so women know how weird it is. Surely, to give birth must give you a perspective that anybody who has never done it just cannot hope to have. The male ego floats on this myth of separateness that no woman has the luxury of entertaining, because birth, pregnancy, menstruation, care for the sick, care for the dying, these are boundary dissolving activities that keep women close to the nitty gritty. The male organism can go off into its own private Idaho, pretty much. Often what child rearing means is the simple act of impregnation, and that’s the contribution in many cases, in primitive and modern societies. Death is something that the women take care of. At birth in primitive societies men are never present; women do it alone or with other women.


In these Neolithic and Paleolithic societies this tendency of the ego to tumorize and grow in individuals was kept down by a chemical regulator, which was the psychedelic experience. It was part of the food chain and it suppressed ego, much in the way that drugs are given in prisons to suppress libido, because it’s hard to manage a highly libidinous people in an institutionalized situation, especially when only one sex is involved. So this natural regulation of the human species by regulating this psychic function called ego was disrupted with the invention of agriculture. The hunting-gathering society with its deep involvement in ecstasy, these weekly or biweekly psychedelic orgy ecstasy picnics that people used to have, that gave way. Weston La Barre makes the point that ecstasy is not at a premium in agricultural societies because it’s disruptive. What is at a premium in agricultural societies is the ability to get up before dawn and pick up your tools and go to the fields and work like a dog. If people have been up all night before, dancing and tripping, they can’t do that. The psychedelic gods are replaced by cereals — corn, wheat, rye — and of course at a very early strata in the Neolithic you do get the emergence of the Great Corn God and all this. Frazer is full of talk about this. So we are living the legacy of millennia of cultural neurosis in Western civilization by virtue of the fact of the untreated growth of the cancerous ego. We know this, it’s simply that we assume there is no cure, we assume that it’s natural to have ego and that it’s somehow unnatural to suppress it. Wherever you have an outbreak of psychedelic use in a high-tech society then you see refeminized, hang loose, communal, caring values. Values come into prominence within the community.


Audience: Have you seen a difference in the way men and women react to psychedelics, given the fact that perhaps men embody a stronger male ego than women? My other question has to do with the role of observer ego when you’re doing drugs, whether it’s marijuana or alcohol or especially psychedelics. Sitting here, thinking that the reason that I don’t take anything stronger than marijuana is that I lose myself even in a strong hit of marijuana, I lose my ego completely. I get a different form of the experience if I don’t get fearful and paranoid, but it’s easy to get scared when the sense of the observer ego just goes and I don’t remember that I’m on a drug trip and it seems timeless and eternal. Then I come down later. As you were saying, at the backside of the high I say, “Oh, yes, I just took some marijuana two hours ago. Everything’s fine, I’ll recover tomorrow.” Maybe you can talk a little about that and what people can do who don’t have a strong ego structure, whatever it takes to do these powerful drugs. I don’t think I would be able to handle it.


If you don’t have a strong ego structure, chances are you’re not a heavy-duty male dominator, because they’re sort of antithetical. I think probably cannabis was a major ego dissolver and that all these things have been used this way, and if that works for you, that’s fine. I didn’t take psychedelics to lose my ego. Although people said that would happen, I never quite understood what was meant, but looking at it as a mass phenomenon, where you’re not talking about an individual tripper but tens of thousands of people, inevitably this feminizing of values seems to take place. I don’t know if men and women experience psychedelics differently, I’ve never quantitatively looked into this, but my impression is that it’s less of a surprise to women and that they feel less of a need to do it. I think this is particularly true of cannabis; I’ll bet that two thirds of cannabis use is male use. Why is this? I’m not sure. Maybe women have too much work to do, too many obligations. The old man can sit and smoke dope, but somebody has to do the shopping, get the kids to school and pick them up, keep the insurance paid and all that. Women, I think, have a different relationship to it. Women are often shamans, and in many cultures the best shamans are usually felt to be women. Women are connected up to all of this stuff. Drug taking may not be a male enterprise but history is a male enterprise. I don’t think we would have ever gotten into it if it had been up to women.


In a way, the women outsmarted themselves because they had, not control in the conscious sense, but they were sitting in the front of the canoe and then they invented agriculture and that undercut their own position, because the vast repository of plant knowledge that had been the secret knowledge of women no longer really mattered as long as you knew how to grow corn and a couple of other things. The vast encyclopedic data on wild plants became less important and it became more labor intensive. Men, because they had evolved toward being efficient hunters, probably did have a physical edge on women in terms of stamina and the ability to work with a hoe for 8 or 9 hours a day, because what the women did when they were in the prime cultural situation was that they gathered. They looked at stuff and talked about it with each other, and this was the domain in which language then arose. Gathering is not hard work, it’s just steady work, and it’s lots of fun


it’s just steady work, and it’s lots of fun if you do it with your friends. The cliched notion about aboriginal peoples is that women chatter, this phrase, “the chattering of women” in primitive situations. It really is true that women avail themselves of language much more than men in these preliterate situations. The men are hunters and they act like hunters: they’re stoic, they hold it all in. Literally, the larger bladder size of men is thought to be related to the hunting adaptation and so forth. The men are stoic, they’re holding it in; the women are information freaks, for them it all rides on information. “Where do you find it? How do you cook it? What does it look like? Is it poisonous? What time of year is best? What soil is best? What do you combine it with? Is it good all year round? What do the flowers look like? What does the fruit look like?” Data, information. How could you ever understand the


Data, information. How could you ever understand the use and location of 600 plants or more unless you had a tremendously evolved vocabulary for this kind of thing?


Audience: The physical weakness that follows psilocybin, is there any way to prevent that?

These things take energy. Obviously, during the trip energy is being sucked into the moment. A trip is hard work even if you’re sitting still, so then there’s going to be an energy debt. One way of assessing the toxicity of a drug — in the course of this weekend I’ve named several ways, and they all need to be used together — one way of assessing toxicity is how you feel the next day. What I do when I take mushrooms is that I usually take them at about 9 at night. By 1 or 2 in the morning it has usually passed, and then I eat before I sleep so that I don’t wake up in the morning with a protein debt. That’s very important, if you eat before you sleep after a trip, it won’t be nearly so hard a comedown. One of the things that’s really appalling to me about MDMA is that here is this pretty minor psychoactive, and my God, the day after is tough sledding. For a hangover like that you should at least have seen God. LSD: if you drink a lot of water, that helps, and yes, vitamins are never a bad idea at any point with these things. LSD, as I said yesterday, was so effective at low doses that on that scale it appeared very non-invasive. I feel terrible after taking LSD, it takes me 24 hours to put it back together.


The interesting exception to this, and it always seems to cut my way in terms of favoring the ones I think are most interesting, DMT is again the anomaly here. DMT is the most powerful hallucinogen there is. If it gets stronger than that I don’t want to know about it. 15 minutes after you do it, you feel as though as you have never done a drug, you are down 100%, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, physically. It just returns you to the baseline. Ayahuasca goes DMT one better, and ayahuasca is the only one that I know of that does this. I maintain that the reason these things behave this way is because they are so similar to ordinary brain chemistry. With ayahuasca, you actually come out slightly higher than you went in, and it isn’t lost. I mean, you feel great the day after an ayahuasca trip. If it’s your first trip and you spent 8 hours vomiting, you’re probably not going to feel so good, but if it was an ordinary ayahuasca trip then you’re going to feel much better the day after than you did going in: more connected, more alert, more energy. This must have something to do with the fact that the constituents of ayahuasca — harmine, harmaline, DMT — all occur in the human brain. Why doesn’t this happen with psilocybin? I don’t know. Psilocybin doesn’t occur in the brain but it is a very close relative.


I think DMT is absolutely fascinating from every point of view. Why is it so benign? Why is it so powerful? Why is it so short acting? Why is it so hard to get any? That’s the $64 question. Believe me, every book on drugs that you pick up says it’s easily made, they ask you to believe that people are making it in their kitchens all around you. Well, I don’t know. I’ve seen it botched many times. The literature doesn’t tell you that; botched, ruined. If somebody comes to you with a grainy, dark brown syrup, forget it. That is not what it looks like. That means that they swept the floor after they dropped the retort or something. What it looks like is orange moth balls. It looks like a crystalline, waxy, orange to pale rose to yellow kind of substance, and it’s very aromatic. If someone shows you a liquid or stuff which looks like brown sugar, it’s a mess. We were


like brown sugar, it’s a mess. We were appalled, we got samples of underground DMT and ran high pressure liquid gas chromatography on them, and it literally looked like the guy swept the floor. These people had actually done it. I wouldn’t have given it to a rat, much less a human being. The notion of someone actually taking that stuff was just hair raising. What you should have is a very steep spike at 620 nanometers and what we got looked like the Himalayas. It was running around all kinds of stuff. There has been DMT around which was shootable DMT, which is the hydrochloride, and since I don’t shoot things I didn’t pursue it, although what people tell me is that shooting is not as effective as smoking. People think that shooting a drug is the most effective way, because you see it all go into your body or something, I don’t know. If you shoot DMT it takes about 5 minutes to come on and lasts about 45 minutes.


minutes to come on and lasts about 45 minutes. That’s why if you read in the literature, “How long does DMT last?” it will always say 45 minutes. If you smoke it, the peak experience lasts 400 seconds, something like that. It’s extreme, that’s why it’s so astonishing, because it is so intense and the onset is so sudden that it’s more like something has happened to you, rather than that you’ve taken a drug.


Sometimes people come out of it saying, “What happened?” “Have we done it yet, or was there an earthquake and the roof fell on me just as we were about to do it?” It has the quality of an event rather than an experience, and also it has the quality of an event because it does not touch the core observer. You are not changed, what’s changed is the sensory input. You are still who you are. You don’t think you’re God, you don’t feel bad about yourself, you are exactly who you were before you did it with the same set of concerns, but you have been whisked into an alien dimension, one you never had imagined existed or could have a moment before have conceived of, and suddenly it’s 100% in place 360 degrees around you, and then 3-10 minutes later you’re raving to your friends, and it’s as far away as that trip to Mallorca four years ago.

Audience: Could you explain the distinction between DMT and 5-MeO-DMT in terms of the quality of the experience?


They are day and night. 5-MeO-DMT, some people like it. It’s a feeling, that’s what it’s been for me. It’s this huge feeling that kind of sweeps through you, and it’s velvety. It’s hard to describe, but the main thing that I’m noticing when it’s happening is that I am not hallucinating. Of course, the main thing that’s happening with DMT is that you are having hallucinations so intense, so three-dimensional, so highly colored, so sculpturally defined that it’s more real than reality. By that I mean: if you look at this room, notice how all edges are slightly feathered, there is at all boundaries a slight indeterminacy, but on DMT it’s hard-edged, everything is just defined. Sometimes people say, “It’s as though all the air had been pumped out of the room.” You’re seeing it with that lunar starkness and clarity: unimaginable objects, objects off the art scale, and entities. DMT is the only one of these psychedelics where I have seen the entities. On psilocybin it speaks and it’s audial. On DMT you see these things. I don’t know whether it’s my personal mythology…


For me, DMT is the center of the mystery. I fear it, I love it, I thank God for it, I wonder if I’ll ever understand it. It takes a huge mustering of courage on my part to do it. I mean, we talk, talk, talk: change, transformation, other dimensions. This is not talk when you do it. You just do not know the parameters. I feel like I know more about what could happen to me if I’m in the Amazon jungle than I know what could happen to me when I’m in that place, and after many DMT trips I’ve finally been able to paint a picture for myself of what is happening in there. I don’t know anybody who has done it as much as I have. I wish people did it more and talked more about it, because, boy, if there is a landscape where we need some consensus, this is it. I have been present when people did it, and they come back babbling about the same thing I think that I have encountered. One woman said, “It was a carnival, it was an extraterrestrial midway,” and somebody else came back and said, “There were gnomes, there were elves,” and yes, this is getting close to it.


What happens to me when I do it is that there is an initial period of hysteria and confusion. It’s almost as though time speeds up, even before you take the first hit. Many people say, “Just before you do DMT there’s this funny kind of impression in the room,” almost as though there is backwash from the event about to happen. You are caught in the psychic field of this event and everything is moving faster and faster, it’s like the Q phenomenon. Then you take the hit and it’s building up in your body and your heart is pounding, and then you break through to this place. The first impression is of the sound of cellophane being crumpled, that crackling sound, as if someone had just taken a bread wrapper and crackled that cellophane. A friend of mine says, “That’s the sound of the radio entelechy of your soul tearing out of the organic envelope,” which is what it sounds like. It sounds like your body has just been


sounds like. It sounds like your body has just been wadded up and thrown into a corner and now you’re a radio signal approximately four lightseconds in diameter spreading out through an alien universe, and the next impression is of a cheer. It’s, “Hoorah! Welcome, welcome!” It’s them, they’re waiting and they can hardly wait. There’s a moment when they are not on me, just a moment, and then they say, “You’re here, we’re glad to see you! Why did you stay away so long?” and then they come toward me, and the main thing for me in the DMT thing is to struggle not to go into shock of wonder, basically. There is a strong tendency, and for the first few trips I couldn’t conquer it. I was just a victim of it, I would just go into this, and I would say, “Heart? Heart OK. Breathing? Breathing OK,” but I’m looking and I can’t believe my eyes, because I’m in some kind of domed place.


The impression, don’t ask me why, the impression is of being underground, even though it’s a huge vaulted space and highly colored. What is, of course, riveting my attention are these beings. They’re small, and they’re like I’ve described them, as machine elves. They seem partially machine-like and partially elf-like. They are not so mundane as that, they don’t have a fixed body outline, and in fact that’s one of the things that going on in this space that’s so baffling. They come toward you. They are singing in this alien language which you somehow understand — it cannot be translated into English but you understand it in that moment — and they are using their voices to produce objects. So song becomes thing, and there are dozens of these things and they come closer and closer, and the songs they sing condense into objects, and the objects themselves can sing. These things come and they are saying, “Look! Look!” and they are holding this stuff out to you, and you look at it, and you’re fighting wonder because your entire being is caught up in, “This can’t be happening,” and yet they’re saying “Just look!”


What are these things? Devices? Toys? Works of art? Objects? Whatever they are, they are amazing, and you look into it and they seem to be shifting, even though they’re made of metal and glass and gems and pulsating. Everything is migrating and shifting and changing and they say, “Look at this one!” It’s the most astonishing thing you’ve ever seen, and then they say, “Look at this one, look at this one!” and they’re piling up. These things are coming toward you and then they jump through you, they can pass through your body. They’re running around, chirping and singing and making these objects. What they’re doing is they are saying, “Do what we are doing, do what we are doing!” and you just say, “I just want to go back to New York.” They say, “Later for that!” The implication is — and this is the mystery of my life, I’m teasing it out, trying to understand it — but the implication and the promise is that ahead of us in time, 6 months, 50,000 years, is a visible linguistic channel of communication. That the thin channel of audial communication composed of small mouth noises is just a provisional kind of communication, and what is being proposed in this state is a true telepathy. Now I always thought that telepathy means that you think and I hear what you’re thinking. What it actually turns out to be is that you speak and I see what you mean. I don’t mean that metaphorically, I mean I see what you mean, so that your linguistic intentionality condenses as a three-dimensional object in front of us, a sculptural modality. So then we both see what you mean; you made it and I’m your conversational cohort, and we’re both looking at your meaning. We can walk around it, we can adjust it.


Notice that no common dictionary is necessary here. If you’re Witoto and I’m Polish, I still see what you mean, because what you mean is an objectified three-dimensional modality, not a string of Witoto words, and it’s saying, “Do this, do what we are doing!” It took me about 15 trips to get this far, and then I began to experiment with sounding in that state and I discovered that they were right. That “mmmm” is a 3.5 foot wide, 8 foot long, magenta curved surface with lime auras, and that “uhnnn” shifts the lime auras into rose pink and adds grey-silver pinstriping along one edge. I thought, “My God, what is this?” Then when you break out into actual chanting, actual linguistically-modulated sound, you discover that you too can make these objects. What they apparently are — how this could be, don’t ask me — they are apparently syntactical sculpture, sculpture made of syntax. Syntax suddenly becomes not the rules that govern spoken languages, but the rules that govern the assembly of three-dimensional thought objects, as though words were the shadows of hyperdimensional intentions that can actually be broken through to. Well, my God, I just thought that this was the weirdest, this takes the cake. I’ve never heard of such a thing. Nobody’s ever suggested to me that this is possible.


So then, as is the case with most things, if you look long enough you discover precursors. What I discovered in a wonderful book, and any one of you would love this book, I’m sure. It doesn’t deal with the psychedelic experience by name, but it is a psychedelic book. It’s called The Phenomenon of Life by Hans Jonas, and if you can find this book, what a read. It’s a group of essays, and in one of the essays he is talking about the etymology of the word “Israel,” and he says, following Talmudic thinkers, that Israel means “He who sees God,” that this is the actual etymological basis of the word “Israel.” Did I say that we are talking now about the writings of Philo Judeaus? Yes, Philo Judeaus, in discussing the etymology of the word “Israel,” says that it means “He who sees God.” Then he says, “What does this mean, he who sees God?” Well, as you probably know, in the Hellenistic world there was this phenomenon called the Logos. The Logos was an informing, internal voice that tells you the right way to live. It’s like a spirit ally that speaks to you and informs you. So Philo Judeaus said, “What would be the more perfect Logos?” and then he goes on to answer his own question. He said, “The more perfect Logos would go from being heard to being beheld without ever crossing over a quantized moment of distinct transition.” This is precisely, and in fact, what is going on in these states, because now I have learned or have found out how to evoke this DMT phenomenon in the more controllable environment of the psilocybin intoxication.


It happens like this: first of all, I form the wish for it to happen. I usually follow a line I learned in an old I Love Lucy rerun where she’s explaining to Ethel how she contacts flying saucers and she says, “I just say, “Come in, little green men! Come in, little green men!”” So on mushrooms I do this, I say, “Come in, little green men!” and what begins to happen is this sound like bells, like very distant bells. Then it becomes louder and louder, sort of like bells with wind. It becomes louder and louder and more complicated and more complex, and at a certain, very hard to precisely define moment, it begins to spill over into the visual cortex. Then I see the language and I can interact with it. It is apparently a more perfect Logos.

This is what I had in the back of my mind yesterday. Remember when I talked about how smoking was new to Europeans and they couldn’t understand what it was, and then I made this offhand comment that it was a new use for the human body, only 500 years old? Well, it proves that there may be undiscovered uses for the human body. I mean, we’ve only been around playing with our bodies for 50,000 years, and we’ve discovered most sexual configurations, and all these acrobatic things and amazing things that people can do like make pyramids of ten individuals, but smoking is pretty basic, and yet only 500 years old. It seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization is a mode shift of some sort that would make language beholdable, and that if we could somehow kick over into this alternative mode we would become unrecognizable to ourselves. Now I realize that this sounds pretty far-fetched, but you always have to have reference to context.


In a universe where there were no people, that would be a pretty far-fetched idea, but the fact that we already possess language seems to argue that we are in the process of continually evolving new applications for our bodies. When spoken language burst onto the scene 35,000 years ago, by most estimates — think of it: 35,000 years ago, people invented language — what must it have seemed like to them? It must have seemed like a miracle. Hardly anything sets you up for it. The difference between a 9 hour recitation of oral poetry and three chickadees on a line is quite a leap. I’m suggesting that somehow there could be a leap forward in the communication dimension and that this is in fact what shamanism is all about, what the end of history is all about, what psychedelic drugs are all about. We are edgewalking on an ontological transformation of what it means to be human. The mode that this transformation will come in will not be political or technological. It isn’t starflight, it isn’t socialism; it’s a whole other way of making our minds known to each other, by being able to show each other our minds. In psychedelic states you can do this.

Audience: Do you think there is any relationship to the Australian aboriginal belief that the forefathers actually sung the world into being? That concept doesn’t seem too far off.


Yes, that’s right. In our own tradition, “In principio erat Verbum, et Verbo caro factum est,” in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh. That’s the whole story. What we need to do is to pass through this transition and make the Word flesh. In other words, to somehow objectify the Word. Believe me, I talk about these things but the pictures are provisional. I don’t understand how it could be done. I’m an engineering type on one level, but is it an acoustical hologram? How in the world could I make you see a concept in my mind as though it were hovering three feet above the floor? Is there a way?


I’ve noticed on psychedelics, and again, I don’t know whether this is a false trail or whether this is part of the mystery, but I’ve noticed on psychedelics that if you get a person between yourself and a candle so that you have them in profile, and they are raving and you can see the candle past them, there’s something coming out of their mouth. It’s like how when you agitate oil in water you see this swirling oiliness of water, or when you’re in a swimming pool with too much suntan lotion in it there’s this kind of roiling discontinuity that’s fairly subtle. Well, something like that is happening for about 8 inches in front of people’s mouths when you look at them under certain conditions. Maybe it doesn’t need psychedelics, I don’t know. It’s possible that it’s nothing, it’s that air goes into your lungs, is heated and then is returned to the colder air of the room, and what you’re seeing is the mixing of the warm and cold air which have different refractive indices, and so it shows up as a kind of wave-like distortion. Could be; I am a reductionist on one level. If it’s not real, then I want to know that it’s not real, but I’m not sure that that’s what it is, because it seems to me that they are beginning on a very small level to do this thing and language seems to me to be a continuous spectrum.


Because I’m a public speaker, because I work with language, I think about these things a fair bit. It seems to me that language begins in total inarticulation, basically “um, erm, ungh” kind of stuff, and then it goes on to operational speech: “Give me this, bring me that, change my diapers,” this kind of thing. Then you introduce the notion of communication. I mean, at what age do children become capable of saying, “I feel x, y and z”? What this means is that they are beginning to move invisible, interior modalities out into the linguistic domain, say, “I feel sick to my stomach, I feel too awake to go to bed,” so forth and so on. Then you get more complex ideas, where people are conveying abstract ideas. Then you get eloquence, a speaker who can make you listen and can rivet your attention. Then beyond eloquence comes poetry, and supposedly in the Irish tradition and in other traditions, great poetic feats were undertaken and poets were magicians. The difference between a poet and magician was practically nil, but that’s where we’re asked to believe that it ends, in great poetic eloquence.


It seems to me that it’s possible to just keep going, and one of the curious things about the way we think about language is that when we talk about clear language, we always use visual metaphors. To understand someone you say, “I see what you mean.” Seeing is the sense that we trust. “He spoke clearly,” is a visual metaphor. “She painted a picture,” “I see what you mean,” as though we unconsciously sense that language is an uncompleted project at this point, moving toward a visual mode of expression. If we say that the psychedelics are catalysts for imagination, then what is it that they are catalyzing? They are catalyzing the further concrescence of language. Who knows how long this is. Looking back at the invention of language, you kind of have to suspect that it happened rather suddenly, that people went from not speaking to speaking quite suddenly. They had all the physical machinery: the lungs, the vocal chords, the coordinating mind, and apparently, if you follow Chomsky and his school, the genetic foundations for syntax. Syntax, Chomsky has shown, precedes language. Chimpanzees and squids show evidence of syntax, but their language is extremely rudimentary. Somehow you can’t have language until you have syntax — syntax is the set of rules that define language — but at a certain point, language has this capacity to become truly self-reflecting. I can’t imagine what a world would be like where this ability would be mastered. I suppose you would have to say it is a psychedelic world.


Audience: Earlier you were talking about this possibility, and you were saying, “I can’t imagine how we would do this,” and you started talking about it, and to me it felt like you were talking about something hovering. At that point I could almost see that it would be possible to continue. When you said “hovering,” I got “hovering,” I could almost see something hovering, and it seems like there’s really an evolutionary thing, that once people get used to really hearing each other it would just begin to happen. Little by little, we’ll get used to it and we may not even know it. Maybe it’s happening now, that language is being used much more in different ways than it used to be.

Yes, I think that’s true. My fantasy is of a workshop where some day we get it out. That’s really what I want to do: I want to punch a hole into this other place and have this linguistical, syntactical, intentionality-directed stuff pour into the universe and fill it to the brim. It seems to me that this is a real possibility. Whenever I’m stoned, I have this notion that I call the Last Conversation. It’s where it seems possible to sit down with somebody of good will and say, “We’re going to have the Last Conversation. We’re going to start from here and we’re going to work our way in, and when it’s over with there will be no you, there will be no me, there will be no here, there will be no there, because we will have carried out some kind of Derrida-type deconstruction project on the apparent reality and we’ll be left with bedrock.” I don’t know if that’s the same program as the visible language. What I do know is that with ayahuasca in the Amazon basin, this is what’s going on. They call it singing, but it’s a visual art.


Our little company sells ayahuasca songs. Well, they are audio recordings, but they are visual works of art. How they sound doesn’t matter, it’s how they look. When you’re sitting in a blackened hut with these people you’ll hear someone lay down a riff which manifests as a flourescent pink line with grey undershading, and it’s a wavy line. The shaman is sitting next to the singer and will go back through and place a mirrored green dot in the trough of each wave, and the sound is lost in this. The experience is entirely visual. Is it only abstract colored patterns and moving fields of light, or can I sing you my grandfather and you would see him with his blue visor and his pegged pants and his crew cut? It’s this kind of thing, you know.

This is why I believe that the psychedelic experience has some kind of historical role to play. If we take seriously that it is an enzyme for the imagination, and if we take seriously the notion that language is the carrier wave of the imagination, then probably what we’re involved in here is a quantized evolutionary leap to a higher modality of language. It will come out of our biological organization; it’s not cultural, and it’s still less technological. It’s in the bones and tongue and brain and lungs of human beings.

Audience: Terence, when you’re in one of these circumstances and you speak to the little people, if someone were in the room with you, would they hear you speak? Do you actually acoustically verbalize this kind of conversation from your side?


Yes. It’s a kind of glossolalia, or that’s what we would have to call it. Glossolalia, as you all probably know, is speaking in tongues, but this has characteristics that glossolalia doesn’t have. For one thing, people who do glossolalia have a kind of disconnectedness from it. In other words, in these Pentecostal churches when someone will go into glossolalia, often when they come out they will turn to the people around them and say, “Did I speak in tongues? Did I really do it?” In other words, there seems to be a kind of occlusion of the observing mind. The other thing is that glossolalia of that sort involves pretty radical physiological changes. Some of you may know Felicitas Goodman, who wrote a book on glossolalia. She measured pools of saliva 18 inches across, having originated from a single person during a 20 minute burst of glossolalia. Well, that’s a pretty lathered-up, hyped-up state to be in. The glossolalia induced by DMT and psilocybin is controlled and willed. It’s as though the English-forming part of the mind steps away and an ursprach, a kind of primordial language, steps in. It’s highly modulated; it doesn’t have to be screamed, sung or chanted, it can simply be done at conversational levels. When you do this in the stoned state, it’s wonderful, and when you make tape recordings of it and listen to it in the unstoned state, it’s either alarming or silly. I mean, people have said to me, “Soft-pedal this part of it, because it’s too weird.”