So I think we have been entirely too casual about the importance of the psychedelic experience. This is, for one reason, because we cannot publically get together and discuss it in detail. (0:52:00) And one of the things I think is very important about get-togethers like this is if you would look around you’ll notice that we cannot really be distinguished from the rest of society. Some of us live under bridges, some of us clip coupons, you know there’s a wide spectrum of people here. But this is your affinity group. This is your community. (0:52:30) Someone in this room actually has what you need. And you know, I have acted as a filter so out of millions living along the front range, here we’ve gotten it down to two hundred. I can’t get go any further than that folks. the rest is up to you.

Well, I guess the last thing I want to say and then we’ll take a little intermission (0:53:00) and then come back and do questions afterwards, which is my favorite part. But I want to just for a minute invoke the psychedelic experience without regard to the evolutionary forces that created it, or the political institutions that suppress it, and so forth, and just say, in case there’s some soul in this room that’s never had this experience, that this is extraordinary news. (0:53:30) We are not talking about something like a dream. It is not like meditation. No you can’t get there by yourself. And Baba Gee is equally useless, because you and Baba Gee are starting from the same place in this game. It requires pharmacological perturbation of ordinary neuro chemistry in order to see this mystery.

Transcribed by Kevin Evans


Transcribed by Kevin Evans

[0:54:00] And it is a mystery. It is not gonna be reduced to the firing of synapses or repressed sexual desires or day residues or anything like that. It is uh the very thing we call this religions yammering about. It’s there. It’s real. I mean, if you think if the world is empty of adventure then you just haven’t been hanging out with the right crowd.[audience laughs] I mean, [0:54:30] on a saturday night, within the confines of your own apartment, on five grams of psilocybin mushrooms in silent darkness, I guarantee you, you will believe that [inaudible] should place second place to you. [audience laughs]. You will see things which no human being has ever seen before, and that no human being will ever see again. That is how big [0:55:00] that universe is. The -can be- incredibly constricting space time locus of here and now that evolutionists forced upon us for survival purposes, is simply one point in an apparently infinite hologram of explorable data that is the human world. I mean the [uh], you know, the entire world of every science fiction novel or story ever written is miniscule [0:55:30] compared to the universes of strangeness and peculiarity that are accessible to anyone of us, if you will, but apply the methods. And if you're not willing to apply the methods then you know, you're gonna sweep up around the [inaudible] till hell freezes over [audience laughs] and not understand what’s going on. [audience laughs] [laughs].


I mean I think, you know [0:56:00] I-I’m sorry to be so hard on religion. [audience laughs] I think it has it’s place, it places it’s inspirations of - of ethical behaviour, you know religion should teach ethical behaviour. But is has very, very little to say about the mystery of being of other than that it’s there. And that’s not practicing religion. Practicing religion is dancing with the mystery. [0:56:30] Losing and finding yourself in the mystery. And people often say to me you know, well this- how does this relate to other forms of spiritual work? The answer is: maybe not at all. I mean I’ve certainly taken a lot of psychedelics and I think I see no sign of spiritual attainment uh of ethical perceptions or anything so wa-de-da as that. I don’t know what this is [0:57:00] all about but I do know it’s ours. It belongs to us. We are the creatures of mind. And 95% of what mind is lies on the other side of the psychedelic, eh boundary. Ordinary consciousness is just like keeping the account of live. But there’s more to life than the account books. I mean everything else is out there. The colour, [0:57:30] the affection, the humour, the terror, the mystery, the incredible strangeness of it all. This is the domain that we want to claim and explore. And if we can find the collective institutional courage to do it. I think this current planetary crisis will be seen for what it really is. And what it is is, it is not a dime, these are not the last rights for intelligence, this is a birth process.


[0:58:00] I mean if you were to come around, if you’ve never seen someone give birth and you came around the corner and it was in progres, you would be thoroughly, profoundly alarmed. I mean it looks like an enormous tumour is making it’s way out of somebody and they are being split in two and blood is being shed and there's pleading and screaming and thrashing, It would be a real leap of understanding for you too say: “Oh how wonderful, new life [audience laughs] [0:58:30] is emerging, this is the way we do it!” Well this is the way we do, I mean we are in the birth canal, right now of a planetary civilization. Literally the amniotic oceans of 500 years ago, that’s all gone. There is no frontier, there is no going back. Th-the peace of the fetal environment is gone and now in transition literally the walls are closing in. [0:59:00] You can’t breathe, you can’t eat, you can’t find your way, it appears to be the end. But there’s light at the end of the tunnel. The problem is, that tunnel is in the back of your mind. And if you don’t go to the backside of your mind you will never see the light at the end of the tunnel. And once you see it then it the task becomes to empower it in yourself and other people. Spread it as a reality. God di-did not retire to the seventh heaven. God is some kind of lost continent in the human mind. And if we will but explore the human mind we can reclaim these relationships with our own authenticity and shed the childishness of historical existence and euh gender politics and all the rest of it and move on to the real business of establishing a real civilisation. Thank you very much! [audience claps] [1:00:00]


Transcribed by Matthijs Pals

1:00:00(..audience clap.) Does anyone want to ask a question? Or is it all just perfectly clear out of the convincing and urm..

Terence: Yea?

Audience: (inaudible question)

Terence: urm.. Psilocybin? Bad effect.. (drinks water)..Huh.. somebody once said, “what’s wrong with DMT?” and i said, “well nothing, unless you fear death by astonishment.” (audience laughter) (Terence Mckenna laughing) 1:00:30..(uhm).. But..but your question is a good one, first of all..uhm.. You know I talked a lot about how what we will have to do is destroy and ablate ego. However, there is a very small percentage of us who have a hard time creating any ego whatsoever. And this...for these people boundary dissolution is no problem, their boundaries are dissolving all the time on them. I would say that they are at the (umm)

1:01:00..(uhmm) contraindicated end of the spectrum. That if you’re fearful already and fighting to keep overwhelmed by confusion and what’s going on in your life at the paper box factory or something.. (inaudible audience laughter) Then probably tossing in megadoses of hallucinogens is not the way for you to do it, or if you do, if you’re just advance on doing that then i would say umm..


1:01:30..do it in the presence of some kind of professional and how you find a professional in this legal climate you’ll have to discuss with me privately. Uhm..uh., i don't want to make it sound though, i mean it’s a tricky thing. I don’t want to make it sound like it’s absolutely riskless. Physically; I think that’s pretty safe. Unless you are odd some way. But you need to know. You know you..you don't wanna find out your odd an hour and half into it. (..Audience laughter..)

1:02:00..But the problem comes with the mind, if you are delicately balanced, if your whole life has been about not looking at that, or that or that (audience laughter) then this is not your game. (Audience laughter).. You know you should go back to watching Jeopardy, and.. (Audience laughter).. The kind of person.. The kind of person who is called to this is..

1:02:30..the person who has an exploring soul. I mean, my , i am not a courageous person in the sense that you won't find me shooting white water, you won't see me you know repelling down the faces of cliffs, but from the time i was the tiniest little kid, i was into the weird. What’s weird? Weird is the compass heading..

1:03:00..and if you keep your compass always pointed towards the peculiar, the oppressed, the bizarre, the unspeakably alien then you know you will find these places. (Audience laughter.) The people who think life is all cut and dried and they’re perfectly happy to have Carl Sagan and George Bush explain all off reality. (Audience laughter). Have never left the broad swift stream of mundane thinking. But you know out


1:03:30..in the by way and in tributaries (ahh..) there is a wonderful alchemical saying which i generally mangle..but i think it goes something like this; the tallest mountain, the oldest book, the wisest desert.. there you will find the stone. And what it is? It is a prescription for exploring weirdness. That’s all. It's’ not gonna be on MTV. It's not going to be in god forbid; Esquire. (audience laughter)

1:04:00..It’s going to come, umm.. From you know ..It’s going to come from doing your homework, visiting strange people in strange lands and checking it out. The.. What i can’t give you to return to your question is, i can’t give you a guarantee that it will be fun. You know, The Rolling Stones have that wonderful line, “you don't get what you want, you get what you need”. This stuff is ruthless. And if there’s..something that you're trying not to look at 1:04:30..that’s gonna get you, for sure. But after the veteran, most people will tell you you learn more from the bad trip than you do from the good one, the good ones are ecstatic and can connect you up to nature and other people the bad one show you your ..your kinks. And your limitations, and your thought errors.. And that sort of thing. It's not a easy road to hold. That’s why i think uhm..


1:05:00..there’s a little bit of social confusion about it. One of the things i should make clear is i really advocate high doses, rarely. I think the worst thing you can do is get into a style of psychedelic didling. Where you know you take half a gram everyday. Wh.. All this is doing is giving you a tolerance to psilocybin. You’re not having the psilocybin experience. You’re having the tolerance to.. 1:05:30-1:06:00..psilocybin experience. The.. Really, the way to do these things, is to (urm..) do them rarely so that your whole system can reassert itself and come to equilibrium and then just slam it! (Audience laughter..) And this is amazing, i mean i think..i think that this works for all the psychedelics. I'm a.. I’m an inveterate cannabis user and i wish in a way that i could get a..

Transcribed by Azlan

1:06:00.. In a way that i could get a slightly better grip on my cannabis use because .. the rea..i think the real way to do cannabis is like.. Once a week.. By yourself.. In silent darkness.. With the strongest stuff you can get.. And then immense amounts of it.. (..audience laughter..) and.. You know.. People call it a recreational drug and a this..and a that...hey...Done that way.. It will


1:06:30.. Catapult you into places where its.. It.. i love it.. The great place to get to on cannabis and some people never in their whole life touch it, is the place where you say, “My god! I’ve done..too much!”. (..audience laughter..) (..Terence Mckenna laughing..).. It's not easy folks, but it.. It’s worth shooting for.. (..audience laughter..) Basically what..

1:07:00.. What you should do is.. You know.. Do some homework.. Read some book.. Talk to your friends. And then hang on Hannah.. (..audience laughter..) It..It’s like.. Ah.. you know.. It's very much like riding an enormous roller coaster. You know.. Once fat baby rolls out of the station.. Do not stand up.. Do not try to climb out of your car. (..audience laughter..) Shut up and hang on! With the faith that most people

1:07:30.. have lived through this. (..audience laughter..)

Terence: somebody else.. Yea? The purple.

Audience: (..inaudible question..)

Terence: Well.. having just heard that i am a pothead please ask them one at a time (..audience laughter..) What is your first literary question? (..audience laughter..)

Audience: (..inaudible question..)

1:08:00.. (..audience laughter..)

Audience: (..inaudible question..(..I mean my associate experience..)… inaudible question..)

1:08:30.. Terence: Well.. i don’t mean to imply that people first use it in low doses and then middle and then higher over time. What i mean..


1:09:00.. What i meant to imp.. I think they were using low, middle and high doses from the very get go. But they were using low doses to hunt.. Middle range doses for orgy and ceremony and truly high doses for this boundary dissolving tremendum.

Terence: Second literary question.

Audience: (..inaudible question....)

Terence: ..Ahuh.. Well....I’m...I’m not wedded to that. First of all,

Çatalhöyük

for those who haven’t read the book. Or know

1:09:30.. about

Çatal

.. Was this immensely sophisticated civilization that existed in the 7th millennium BC. We’re talking .,. Three tho.. We’re talking six thousand (6000) years before (..uhh..) zero (0). This civilization existed and was destroyed.. And the.. (.. urm..)Characteristic of it is, shrine dedicated to cattle. And in my book i argued that this was probably..

1:10:00..the last outpost of this partnership, society.. Ahh.. but it would still..I think the real golden age of mushroom use was probably from about thirty thousand (30,000) years ago to about fifteen thousand (15,000) years ago and by the time

Çatalhöyük ..

so long.. it’s a fading, or yearly, or seasonal saying..

Audience: (..inaudible question..)

1:10:30..Audience: (..inaudible question..)

1:11:00..Audience: (..inaudible question..)

Terence:Well.. I..urm..

Audience: (..inaudible..)

Terence: My argument would be that people don’t take enough and they don’t take it frequently enough. That.. there are a lot of people..


1:11:30 - 1:12:00.. Who..who.. Really would rather not.. Get loaded.. But still they must take some psychedelic drug in order to keep membership in their peer group. So what they did, you know.. You can always spot these people.. Because their first question..on..at the get go is, “will i be able to drive?”.. I love this question. (..audience laughter..) because.. You know it indicates you got a real tough nut on your hand..in every sense of the word...No..!..You will not..

Transcribed by Azlan

1:12:00.. No.. You will not be able to drive. (..audience laughter..) ahh.. So, you know, I.. One of the things that inspires me to do this, is.. I want to get to the people who’ve taken three (3) grams of mushrooms and the people that have taken 150 mics.. Of LSD .. and i want to convince those people that they never got close to what i’m talking about even though they have a life transforming experiences softly..

1:12:30.. totally, differently.. They never got close to what i’m talking about. And so what you have to do is to convince people to take high doses and then..that’s to break them through.. And then frequently enough that they don’t forget. What the deal is.. So i think if you take a psychedelic population and divide into those who have done 5 grams and above, then you will see an exceptional.. Uhm.. slice.. But not the dabblers..

1:13:00.. The dabblers don’t count. And we all can be or at times guilty of this. (..audience laughter..)

Terence: Is that your last question? (..Terence laughing..) That do it for you? (..audience laughing..)


Terence: Or do you wanna be thought psychotic? You choose. (..audience laughing..) (..Terence laughing..)

Audience: (..inaudible question..)

Terence: (..Terence laughing..) Well.. i love competition, i mean.. I .. (..audience laughing..) The..

1:13:30.. The.. competition is terrible, that’s the entire basis of my success. (..Terence laughing..) (..audience laughing..)

Terence: Yeah? No.. Because you were before.. If you still wish..

Audience: (..inaudible..)

1:14:00.. Audience: (..inaudible..)

Terence: Right..

Audience: (..inaudible..)

Terence: Why? Because.. I mean i don’t know if its preferable.. But here’s the thing.. People are going to think you’re a nut, if you come down and say.. That Johan Sebastian Bach or Jerry Garcia is God. And this is what you will have to say..

1:14:30.. If you listen to the dead.. Or the B Minor Map. So.. So.. What i am interested in.. is.. Iss. uhh.. I want to know the thing in itself. Not what it does to Bach.. Not what it does to river flowing through a forest at a valley. I wanna see what it can do with darkness. And silence.. And i think most people think it will be boring..


1:15:00.. Probably because they’ve been hanging out with BDI groups, meditating and god knows there’s nothing more boring on earth than most meditation. (..audience laughter..) however.. Psychedelic sitting in a dark in a room on five (5) dried grams of psilocybin mushroom is nothing like meditating and that’s where it can get at you. My relationship to it is always one of.. “I wanna know what it is..” and so i think this sensory..

1:15:30..deprivation method is the only way to get at that.. Other people might not like that.. People say.. Well you mean, put down the whole thing of going into nature? Isn’t nature the great affirmation in all this? And the answer is, yea.. But it works for me sort of without the drug.. Plus and this is just maybe my own weirdness, but i’ll share it with you. I know this that these things are incredibly disruptive of..of..the ordinary

1:16:00.. flow of casuistry.. You all know the concept synchronicity? Well.. if you don’t stay in your room with the lights out and the phone unplugged and the damndest things will happen to you. I mean you couldn’t pay me to go into an american city even mildly loaded because adventures beckon. Now some people like that.. (..audience laughter..) some people say you know.. Let’s take 500 mics, and go meet..

1:16:30.. weird people.. (..audience laughter..) (..ah..Uhh..)...not this cookie..

Terence: Yea?

Audience: (..inaudible..)

1:17:00.. Audience: (..inaudible..)


1:17:00.. Audience: (..inaudible..)

1:17:30 - 1:18:00.. Audience: (..inaudible..)

Terence: Are you asking me, “Do i think a homeopathic preparations of a psychedelic would be effective?”. (..umm..) It would be homeopathically effective.. I wouldn’t expect it to be experientially effective..

Audience: (..inaudible..)

Transcribed by Azlan

[1:18:00]

Audience: Question?(inaudible) regarding homeopathic preparations of psychedelics

Terence: But don’t you think that if it were true and since in a high dilution like that no molecular trace of the original compound remains, that you have just found the solution to the illegalization conundrum.

audience : …(inaudible) we’re getting a lot of political slack for having medicines out there but homeopathy is being passed over as weird.

Terence: Because in a materialist world it’s assumed to be bogus.

[audience laughs]

Terence: Right, Yeah

Audience: same woman continuing her question

Terence: Well this seems to me not an abstract proposition at all let the best homeopaths sucuss the strongest hallucinogens and set them out and let's give it a whirl

[audience laughs]

Terence: Over on this side, yeah.

Audience: This question may be too personal, or an embarrassment to answer, but..

Terence: Oh I can hardly wait !

Audience: Why are you not in jail?


Terence: Oh I can hardly wait !

Audience: Why are you not in jail?

Terence: Ahhhhh…. Why am I not in jail? hmmm. Well that’s an interesting question. And I , uh, number one I don’t know, here’s what I’ve come up with.Uh, notice that I use big words.

[audience applause]

Terence: I don’t boil, I don’t try to boil it down to a shoutable slogan like “turn on, tune in, drop out” uh uh that, that, then they come, they come, uh, so that’s one possibility. That simply if you are defined in their eyes as an intellectual then they automatically put you in the harmless category and send resources elsewhere. That’s one possibility. Now the other possibility is slightly more disturbing but in the interest of thoroughness let me raise it. Uh, perhaps I’m sanctioned. Perhaps they decided “we don’t really understand what this stuff is, and we can’t have a mass movement, but let one guy just kind of keep the pilot on in case we ever change our minds about this, he will have kept the pilot light on”. Uh, and the other possibility, which is probably too naive but in the interest, again, of exhaustive thoroughness. Maybe they just haven’t noticed yet? You know, Tim Leary, who is a friend of mine would address 25,000 people at a throw. My crowds are, you know, a couple of times a year they creep over a thousand. And I think the key is to keep it low-key. And we don’t want to you know, Dodger Stadium filled or anything like that.


It’s very good to atomize it and spread it through, now the other thing is, you know, I advocate plant hallucinogens. And people always say, “well why, what about LSD, I mean, didn’t LSD change your life? Didn’t LSD change your life? Didn’t LSD change all our lives? Why aren’t you into LSD?” and the answer is certainly yes, and yes. The reason I’m not into LSD is a, a uhhh… not having to do with the effects of LSD, which I think are marvelous. But with the fact that, uh, a, a couple of enterprising second year biochemistry students can produce six or seven million hits in a long weekend. Six or seven million hits of an illegal drug? Suddenly, this is the realm of governments and criminal syndicates and revolutionary disruption of populations. My brethren, I wrote “psilocybin: the magic mushroom growers guide” if you work like a dog for six months, maybe you can produce, uh… 2 or 3 thousand hits. So, that’s the thing. LSD had chemical qualities that made it terrifying to the government, I mean, anybody with 50,000 dollars worth of backing and uh, uh, uh an educat,... 2 years of biochemistry could turn themselves into a major threat to political stability in this country. So they slammed that. They’re not going to put up with that.


The thing I love about the mushrooms is that, if you’re a dedicated mushroom grower, you produce this piddling amount, and if they come and drag you away because it is illegal, all they get is you. No… no… syndicate collapses. No pyramid disappears. So, its invasive. And low-key, and slowly spreading. The other thing is, mushrooms are, this is a cultural thing, mushrooms are inherently non-threatening. They’re absurd , you know, they’re what we, they’re what we put decals of on serving trays and bath towels, bare [1:24:00] mushrooms on them. It's a kind of silly thing.

Transcribed by Joseph Sadaka

“And uh, bath towels [1:24:00] bear mushrooms on them - It’s a kind of silly thing. And uh, and so I think that they don’t really understand what a powerful hallucinogen this is. Well that’s enough on why I’m not in the can. [*points at audience member*] This woman, yeah?

Audience Member: “[inaudible] Uhm, you talk about the uh.. the evolutionary processes how it’s encourage by the ‘essence?’ of the the mushrooms [inaudible] to be, uh, more creative and beneficial process if we worked on evolving our minds without using an external drug, what happens if the government does come in and decide to [inaudible] and we can’t access that same consciousness anymore and then things, you know they could be set backwards again, wouldn’t it be so much more productive to teach people how to get there without the drug?”


Terence: “Absolutely if we could do it, I mean I’m not yet convinced, see. I mean you’ve got your guru’s, but, if you ever get close to any of these people in these guru scenes, close enough where you can just say to them: “Look, level with me, is this stuff as good as 5 grams in silent darkness?” And they say: “Huh, are you serious?” [audience laugh] Uh, the other possibility is technology, uh on two fronts. Mind Machines. The problem with mind machines is, you know, you have to smoke a bomber or two to put up with it more than ten minutes [audience laughs] eh, I mean you quickly satisfy yourself that, this can’t possibly be it. Because it.. it, it is life, and it, but it is contentless.


Well the psychedelic experience is all content. The other possibility - and I put in some time in this beat, is uh, virtual reality. And I have more hope for virtual reality because virtual reality is a technology for showing, for, that would allow us to show each other the insides of our head. Our dreams, our vision. And I think that sufficiently perfected, it might have the consequences of, of the psychedelics. The problem is, it carries a huge amount of negative freight. You know that it’s not gonna be a tool for us to show each other the inside of our minds. It’s gonna be a tool to sell us crap that we don’t want. It’s gonna be a tool for yet more realistic vicarious an gratuitous vile and.. It’s going to be a tool for more pornographic degradation of women. [audience chuckles] So, it seems to me while it holds out the possibility of a technically driven psychedelic, it has a lot of negative freight. I agree with your premise, I.. But I’m driven by a tremendous sense of urgency. I mean why try to create a technical alternative to psilocybin, when you gót psilocybin!

Audience member: “[inaudible] like, I think that people should use mushrooms as, a tech. And what if people there who try, and keep going without, without that tool. Cause, I mean cause what we, what we want, i mean, we wanna transcend.. this plane, we wanna be on a higher plane, a higher state of awareness and you’re not, you’re not gonna get to that plane ultimately if you have to keep coming back into the plane, to get the stuff, to get out of the plane again


[Terence interjects:] “Well how about uh, how about this: Maybe there’s something wrong with that metaphor. Because notice it had to do with planes and transitions, it’s an inherently dualist metaphor.”

[Official-sounding tape transition lady:] “This concludes tape one. Our program continues with tape 2”

[Terence:] “Well how about uh, how about this: Maybe there’s something wrong with that metaphor. Because notice it had to do with planes and transitions, it’s an inherently dualist metaphor. How ‘bout if we say, uh… There is no inside and outside. There is no with or without. Uh, you just use what you got, whatever works should be used. I, I… Spend time in India and visited all these people and [inaudible] And I just became convinced that, unless you were predisposed to believing this stuff, that it would never carry you where you wanted it to. And one thing about psychedelics, you don’t have to be predisposed. It doesn’t work for those who believe it works, uh, it works for those who think it doesn’t work.


One last point and then we’ll go on, uhm, there’s a story, maybe you some of you know this story of uh, a man who lived by the side of a river. And he wanted to uh, he wanted to cross the river. So he, uh, practiced a siddhi of levitation so that he could walk across the water. And it took him forty years to perfect this siddhi and finally he could cross the river, and uh, Buddha was preaching in the neighborhood and the guy came to him and he said uh, “Master, look what I’ve achieved, I can walk on the water to cross the river” And Buddha said “Yeah but the ferry costs a nickel” [Audience cracks up] Uh, and that’s the thing, uh, I think, eh, we’re not gonna replace this tool without wasting so much time in the act of replacing it, [1:30:00] that armageddon will catch up with us. “

Transcribed by Nils Van Der Hoeven

1:30:00.. Act of replacing it that armageddon will catch up with us. I think we have to humble ourselves, so thoroughly that you have to admit that you can’t get where you want to go unless you form a partnership with somebody whose idea of a good time is growing in a cow pie. And if you’re willing to partner up with this humble..humble.. member of the ecosystem, then you and it can fly to glory..

Audience : (..inaudible question..)

1:30:30.. Terence: Have had it..

Audience : (..inaudible question..)


Audience : (..inaudible question..)

Terence: ..Yea, i wouldn’t recommend it especially in the late stages of pregnancy doing anything that is gonna wildly perturb you, and you know LSD is discovered in the act of trying to produce better drugs to induce labour. So that’s excellent advice..

1:31:00.. honor the fetus. Urm.. Yea?

Audience : (..inaudible question..)

Terence: ..Yea?

Audience : (..inaudible question..)

Terence: ..Well, true and honest answer is, “how the hell can you find out when they won't let you do research?” It’s totally insidious! We don’t know..! We don’t know because they will not..

1:31:30.. allow (..um..) The.. the… research to be done. This is one of the reasons why I say that (..uh..) You should stick with (..urm..).. Shamanically sanctioned plants. Because we know for instance that people have been taking psilocybin in the Sierra Madre de Oaxaca Central Mexico for millennium. They don’t show blindness, tumors, miscarriage, madness, cataract, whatever. That’s your..

1:32:00.. human data, for that. But you go to..Let’s talk for a minute about something like ketamine. Nobody knows. Nobody has any data. MDMA.. seems to be tremendously effective in facilitating interpersonal stuff.. That’s a psychological issue.. Chemically, what kind of data do we have? You know.. Six years worth of data.. gathered under the rag. So, (..uhh..) to be safe.. Stick with the things that are sanctioned..


1:32:30.. by human use.. And then, (..uhm..) somehow in the lighten future..We will explore these synthetics and find out just what the parameters are..

Terence: Yea? Finish up..

Audience: (..inaudible question..)

Terence: No, i’m nothing man. I’m saying take things which have been sanctioned by human usage. I mean.. How about a plant like Strychnos nux-vomica..I mean you’re..

1:33:00.. dead in a minute and a half.. And it's a beautiful, wonderful plant.. Why did it kill you? Well, because it's jammed with strychnine, No.. it's nothing about it being a plant, it's about having a repeated history of human usage, that’s what sanctifies it..

Terence: Yea, the lady in magenta.

Audience: (..inaudible question begins..)

1:33:30.. Audience : (..inaudible question continues.. )

1:34:00.. Audience : (..inaudible question continues.. )

1:34:30.. Audience : (..inaudible question comes to an end.. )

Terence: That’s really an interesting point.. I mean....I..I...It never occurred to me, that somebody brought it up to me, they say, “have you noticed the trips are changing?”.. And once you do ask yourself this question, it does seems to be so. And.. I don’t know whether that.. What..i mean that.. (..uhm..) These deep assertion i’m not sure exactly what’s going on. For instance, this goddess thing, I don’t think people gave the goddess a thought in the early..1970..


1:35:00.. Late 1960.. Now.. people have, you know..some of the least likely people report intense encounters with the goddess.. So, is it amplifying the general mindset..of the society and so there’s more goddess up there? Or.. i don't really know.. It's a very interesting question. There are more questions than answers. I mean this is definitely wide open stuff..! Yea..! Yea..

1:35:30.. Audience : (..inaudible question..)

1:36:00.. Audience : (..inaudible question..)

Transcribed by Azlan


"We're trying to restore the relationship of ego to the other components of the psyche that existed as recently as 12.000 years ago. The ego has become a deadly growth in the historical societies, exacerbated by the phonetic alphabet, monasteism, modern science. This is like you're getting sicker, and sicker, and sicker as you lay these things on, and so, the idea is that if we could restore the original diminished role of the ego that it has for that period, however long it was, that we could begin to solve our problems, because the problems which face us, put very simply, are going to demand sacrifice, and sacrifice is what the ego doesn't want to hear about, and when you go to somebody and say -look to save this planet we're going to have to redistribute income radically- I mean that everybody in this room is gonna to have less, we're going to have to honor a whole bunch of cultural positions that we previously just we're going to


cultural positions that we previously just we're going to bulldoze over, and so forth and son on. So it's ah-- it's the diminishing of ego, by any means necessary that lies to getting any grip on our problem, I mean if we continue as we are, I think we have probably less than 30 years before life is irreconcilable screwed up, you know, nobody believes that the future is ah.. rosy and wonderful, I mean if you go to the people of the world bank, and IMF and, these people who are straight you know suits all of them, they have a sort of curves which would stand your hair on it. When they propagate the curve of population, the curve of toxification of the environment, the curve related to the ozone hole this you see, you know, it's finished and sometime in the next 50 years. They don't talk about this because they don't want to panic the vast numbers of people who just go to work and raise their kids and pray


just go to work and raise their kids and pray somebody smarter is doing something about all this, but they don't believe there is any kind of normal future and I don't either, I think we're going to, that this business as usual is not on the menu folks, we're either going to go to an era of immense resource scarcity, regimentation, governmental interference in our life’s, tremendous propagandistic efforts to make us do one thing or another, or we're going to pull the plug on scientism and it's studious and the institutions which feed us, feed it.


If capitalism is an interesting problem more easily discussed now than the communism is, how does the picture, capitalism is as anti-human philosophy as you can possibly conceive because at this very moment we should be consuming less, manufacturing less, selling less, transporting less and what's the battle cry? Free trade everywhere! What does free trade mean? It means my right to come to your country and sell the most outlandish junk you've ever seen and you will have no right to turn it away because in the name of free trade crapola has to go everywhere ah.. it's really, see, they try to tell you that capitalism and democracy are not at variance actually the whole Marxist-Leninist socialist thing was assidish, the real life and dead struggle is between capitalism and democracy. Democracy says everybody has an innate worth that must be honored, capitalism says does who die with the most toys win. You can not reconcile these two things, and nobody wants to talk about this,


things, and nobody wants to talk about this, we're still having the party over the fall of communism. But, you know, you go to the soviet union or the former areas or the soviet union and you see that what it was, it was a deep freeze for traditional culture. In Kurdisia and Turkmenistan people were basically camel husbandry, is whats going on, ah.. now with communism on the rocks ah mac donalds will be there in 5 years and k-mark will be following close behind. So, I think we're coming to a great crisis of fundamental ah.. our relation to our own fundamental institutions. I'm not anti-capitalist, I think capitalism needs to sever it's ah.. connection to materialism. This is again why virtual reality is interesting. You sell things made of light, not made of beryllium metal, brass, steel and wood but light. We got all the light we need but we have to stop making things out of stuff, or we're not gonna be around to


of stuff, or we're not gonna be around to tell the tale."


Transcribed by Nicole

[Inaudible* question from audience] [1:42:00]

No i think that, you know revolutions are made by percentages uh if 15 or 20% changed [1:42:30] then the example would spread. You see, I, uh, we are not, uh, psilocybin is the easy way to awaken. YOu know, take a, take a psychedelic plant and have an experience and get your act together, but the future is full of sledgehammers. It’s not going, we're not, we're not going to end with a whimper, it's going to end with a series of thuds and bangs. It could begin almost anytime. I mean we could get a hot muggy day in Mexico City this summer, and a million people would die. This thing in Los Angeles is a wake up call. It is going to get uglier and more chaotic and more crazy there is going to be more starvation, more facism, more dictatorship. THis is, unless we do something! Until we do something. And it can- how bad is it going to get?! before people say, you know, we are doing something wrong. People dance on the Russians, but you've got to admire people who have got the. The guts to say, “we did it entirely wrong!” 100% I mean could you imagine this country? Being able to tj.. You know it may be coming.. It may be coming. The character from AUstin.. Is a peculiar item in the mix. You know?


For years, i fantasy speech i always imagine that I was somehow end up giving but but it’s it’s theis speech where you say, “MY fellow Americans, you have been lied to.” Screwed and abused by these two criminal parties for a hundred years. And you're only hope is to overthrow the republicrats and create a decent world to live in. well no republican can make that speech no democratic can make that speech and be redible it was to be somebody that wasn’t in bed with either of those forces. So i’m not that all pleased by who apparently will bear the mantle, but on the other and it changes what we need, then if, if it’s probably nothing to be a candidate that you can and i can embrace its going to be some odd ball. Oso you know you have to recognize it when we see it coming. Yeah.

[Audience QUestion can;t hear it }First of all,

Terence: No we don’t know what it is.

inaudible

Yah the great thing about is it can talk!

Good for you. (terrence laughs)


Good for you. (terrence laughs)

Well probably half at least in the room hasn't the faintest idea what the question is about. I stay away from this because this is the personalistic stuff were i created a certain model of reality based on a new way of looking at time and i don’t want to go into it too much tonight. But i want to suggest something to you tonight which is that, cough, you know, uh,hm, at the very beginning at this talk we talked about mutation and natural selection and that , the darwin’s insight was vast and deep, and what h offered was an explanation for how rainbow trout come to be, monarch butterflies, redwood trees, herds of elephants, so forth and so on. What it doesn’t address is us. We are the weird bird on the block. I mean , yes we are some kind of monkey, but when you stand us next to our nearest relative it is very very clear that is is not a very near relative. It doesn't look like us much, certainly doesn't act like us.. What's the deal with human beings? And I think that uhm, it, you know how all these religions these western religions [1:48:00] have built in this idea of the end of the world

Transcribed by Marina Quirk


Transcribed by Marina Quirk

You know how all these religions, these western religions have built in this idea of the end of the world and they’re always running around expecting the messiah or something and this, to the scientific mind is just the final proof of the pudding that these people have water between the ears [audience laughs] because science just says you know ‘that’s just ridiculous’, i mean uh but i wonder, i wonder, i mentioned just a minute a go these curves that when you propagate them into the future [1:48:30] everything leads to the unimaginable and it’s within the next 50 years so uh I sorta think as human beings as uhh analogous to iron filings on a piece of paper and you shake these iron filings out of a salt shaker or something and there they lie randomly arranged in heaps.


Well then you come underneath the paper with a powerful magnet and lo and behold these little [1:49:00] iron filings coherently arrange themselves into this beautiful double mustache pattern, which i'm sure you’ve all seen well i think that there is a-an enormous punchline to the historical process that no- very very few people suspect and that what history is is what happens to an animal who falls under the influence of a kind of strange attractor and that we are being pulled into a well of transformative intentionality, history is not pushed by the casuistry of war, migration, imperial dynastic families and stuff like that, history is pulled toward an unimaginable something which is [1:50:00] continuously trying to mirror itself in us. This is why these egyptians said, you know, ‘i don’t know what it is, but i think we should really build a big simple building’, [audience laughs], ‘i don’t know why. But i’m gonna enslave 50,000 people and do it! And don’t ask me why’ [audience laughs].

And you know this is the same force that reared Chartres Cathedral, this is the same force that created the space shuttle, we are in [1:50:30] a relationship to an unseen something which we keep trying to image with our mythologies, our religions, our technologies, our epiphanies and i think that uhh, it’s not so far away. That it- it isn’t 10,000 years in the future it is sometime in the next 50 years and that this is something what history was for, you see history is an incredibly…[1:51:00] peculiar and brief phenomenon, i mean viewed from the point of view of biology it’s less time than it takes for a new species to emerge, i mean let’s call history 25,000 years.


You know, in frame 1 you’re chicken flint, in frame 2 you’re hurling an instrument toward Alpha Centauri, [*Terence Clicks*], like that! -This happens. Well what’s happening is that mind itself [1:51:30] is being pulled out of this creature and it’s being given hands and languages and pos-symbolic systems in order to image the unspeakable, the unspeakable, I call it the transcendental object at the end of time, it casts- it’s in another dimension, it’s in a kind of super-space and what it casts into history is the enormous shadow of its imminence. [1:52:00] This is what straight people call god. This is what all these visionaries are raving about.

It’s that when you sink below- beneath the surface of ordinary causality and mundane ho-hum-ism what you discover is this enormous transcendental object which you could call it, you know, the sacred heart of jesus or the, flying saucer or the, philosopher's stone, it’s all of those things and much much more, [1:52:30] it’s not only stranger than you suppose, it’s stranger than you can suppose and it has called us out of animal organisation over a 25,000 year period we hang in the balance and then we meet it. And we are going to meet it. That’s the light at the end of that birth canal of transcendence that i referred to... And now i see that our song is sung, our time is done. Thank you very very much for turning in. [1:53:00] [audience claps] Thank you!

[audience inaudible]


[audience inaudible]

™: Yeah we will dig into this in the uhh interim, uhh [1:53:30] i think the, -it’s- it’s worth taking the time for everybody to just make a very brief, very very brief statement about, you don’t have to say who you are if you don’t want to, but you can say what you’re hoping for or why you’re here or what your agenda is.Just so that if it turns out that we are 80% shrinks or 80% ceramicists or something [1:54:00] then we turn it that way.

Transcribed by Jonathan Laliberte

[1:54:00]..or eighty percent ceramicists or something, then we turn it that way and uh, those of you who are undercover please stay undercover so you don’t alarm anybody [audience laughing]..euh..., especially me, right?...euh. So why don’t we just start euh..uhm, and go across in some reasonably logical fashion, it.

[TM: yeah?]

[man with inaudible question]

[TM: Well that, tells you what you’re worth , doesn’t it?]

[1:54:30]..[Terence giggles, audience laughing]

Oh, true...No. Let’s not record it so people, and uhm, also I had at one point [takes a small sip from something] thought I would be an art historian.That was one of my real obsessions. So I had..had enough art history to be trained in, you know, recognising the evolution of motif, how one artist passes on techniques and can see,.. to his students or his..


[1:55:00].. imitators, and all this art-historical stuff. And I also..uh..had been very interested in Jung. And...and none of this seem to explain the content of the psychedelic experience i would get in there and say, well.. How come, i’m not seeing a archetype?.. and be things which somebody else.. You know.. I don’t know.. Ali Ensor. Therabagio Baugh..

[1:55:30].. Somebody should have seen this stuff.. And gotten it out. And it didn’t seem to be..uhh..a trail through the history of western art of the present of this dimension. So then i thought why is it that nobody knew about all this? I mean, Baugh would have given his right arm for a sheet of blotter I would think.. Euh.. So it became for me like a mystery, whe..

[1:56:00].. where is this stuff coming from.. And what does it say about our humanness?

[TM: yea?]

[man with inaudible question]

Well, there.. There’s a lot of being completely still over Baughs because he is such a startlingly radical painter in the context of his time. Many of his conceive were digged up after his life.

[1:56:30].. Uh.. T.L. Breko the elder being the foremost exponent of it.., he may have been an alchemical guinea pig. Euh.. Who. euh.. Frazier.. I think.. Wrote the book called the “Millennium of (..inaudible..) Baughs” in which he wanted to suggest that maybe that Datura use, that there was a cult called the brotherhood of the free spirit. And which practice ritual nudity..


[1:57:00].. Which begins to sound something like the orgies we talked about last night. It was a cult of printers. And it may be that Garden of free spirit but this is all pretty murky stuff, it’s hard to get back to Baughs, euhh.. Euhh.. he didn’t leave any written records we have, his birth is recorded in the perished church where.. In the village..

[1:57:30].. where he was born.. We know he was born sometime around 1450 died in 1516.. But the details are pretty murky.. Well.. not to belabour Baughs, euhh.. So what i thought would be a reasonable way to do this this morning.. (takes a sip from something) is to take the most extreme psychedelic case and experience and describe it and talk about it a little..

[1:58:00].. and then see what issues that raises. Because my experience with this has euh.. Led me to the conclusion that..(..Breathes..) In a way.. (..Exhaless..) It..euh.. To be thought of as other dimension is to be thought of as a mandala, and different psychedelic compounds and generously different kinds of yoga and different kinds of techniques of all sort of land viewing in

[1:58:30].. different part of this mandala but that what you’re always trying to do is get to the center of the mandala and it’s simply my biased, my opinion; that i think the center of the mandala is probably the DMT experience for a number of reasons. And so i thought it’ll be interesting to talk about it this morning. First let me talk about it physically. Uhh.. DMT is..


[1:59:00].. ..uh.. An indole hallucinogen.. Abetted.. No..no.. a tryptamine.. Uhh.. and it’s produced indigenously in the human brain. This is very interesting. Very few psychedelic compounds are produced in the human brain. We don’t know what DMT is doing there. But it means essentially that we all are subject to arrest..

[1:59:30] - [2:00:00].. Of a technicality because we all are holding a schedule one (1) drug.. Euh.. It’s sort of the ultimate catch-22 where if all else fails, they’ll just say well you were holding anyway. Euhh.. the interesting thing about Dm.. Another interesting thing about it that is the incredibly rapid in its onset and in its disappearance the whole trip lasts about 15 minutes..

Transcribed by Azlan

[2:00:00]

[Terence]:“...the whole trip lasts about 15 minutes. This makes it a tremendous tool with which to challenge the critics of our position, because if somebody wants to rise up in righteous wrath and condemn psychedelics, then you say, ‘well, you have tried them, haven’t you?’ and of course they never have; it’s like scientific denunciations of astrology. Mean, scientists love to denounce astrology, but find one who can cast a natal horoscope[2:00:30] and I’ll give you a [inaudible].”

[laughter]


[laughter]

[Terence]: ”uh, ya know? So, uh, the, the uh...uh, uh, the...it...DMT overcomes this objection; the entire experience lasts 15 minutes, so you say to the critic, ‘ya know, you’re NOT going to experience it & yet you’re going to carry on a pogrom against it? You won’t invest 15 mins. To check what this is about; I mean, what kind of scientist are you?’”[2:01:00]

[Terence]: “uh...so, it has that social efficacy. Um, now the fact that, it is the strongest of all hallucinogens--at least if there are ones stronger, please keep them away from me--I mean I don’t think anybody needs to get higher than that. I certainly don’t. I mean, I’ve at times come out of those places and said, ‘this stuff is ILLEGAL! It breaks cosmic law!’[2:01:30] Of course, then, Tim Leary told me, ‘cosmic laws are only local ordinances anyway.’ [laughter] so it didn’t really matter.”

[inaudible audience question]


[inaudible audience question]

[Terence]: “uh, ok. Eh...well, good question. Yes, It’s the commonest of hallucinogens in nature. Uh, It occurs in many grasses: Phalaris Tuberosa, Phalaris arundinacea. Um, it occurs in a number of leguminous plants [2:02:00] uh, uh, probably the most spectacular being Anadenanthera peregrina, this huge, tropical, locust-like tree from which the snuff called niyopa or edena is made. That’s a tough way to get your DMT let me tell you; uh, because there is so much cellulose & other crap & corruption in the mix that you have to do like a tablespoon of each nostril and the technique [2:02:30], the technique is you get a bamboo tube or a hollow tube about this long [indistinct gesture of length] and you pour in this tablespoon of this stuff, and then you squat down on your haunches and you get a friend, and you put the tube up your nostril and the the friend BLOWS with the full-force of his breath; BLOWS this stuff into your head. Well...you fall, it’s like being hit in the face with a 2x4; i mean you it’s like you think he kicked [2:03:00] you, and you fall over backwards, you scream, you salivate, you get backed up on your haunches and by this time he has refilled the tube for the other nostril.” [audience laughter] So, and then, after uh, af…”

[indistinct audience question]

[Terence]: mmhmm, mmhmm...Hmm?

[Audience]: Yopo?


[Audience]: Yopo?

[Terence]: “Yopo, Etena, Nipa [?], it depends on the language group, uh, and the [indistinct] [2:03:30] um, it’s also called Vilka in the Kari language. And then, after uh, ten minutes or so, it slowly begins to form up in your head, but you know, God, your sinuses, are eh, STACKED for sure, and uh..it’s not, uh, not very pleasant; and the other thing is, it never reaches the blinding transformative intensity that [2:04:00] you can achieve with the chemically pure compound.”

[indistinct audience question]


[indistinct audience question]

[Terence]: “No no. The uh, good point. If you orally ingest it, it will be destroyed in your guts. It won’t work. The uh, Amazon Indians, have...encountered this problem and have created a very sophisticated pharmacological strategy for dealing with this, you’ve all heard of ayahuasca. Ayahuasca [2:04:30] is DMT from one plant combined with another plant which contains a chemical which is called a MAO inhibitor. MAO is Monoamine Oxidase, and your gut is full of uh, MAO, and it’s job is to take monoamines--small molecules--and oxidize them into uh, harmless by-product: usually endocytic acid, which can be shunted to the bladder. Well, [2:05:00], when you take DMT orally, these monamines just uh, I mean these monoamine oxidase compounds just grab onto it and destroy it, but if you take an MAO inhibitor with it, and harmine, which occurs in Banisteriopsis caapi is an MAO inhibitor, then, lo and behold, it isn’t destroyed in your gut. Instead, it passes into the bloodstream, it passes through the blood-brain barrier, which is a very tight chemical filter that keeps the [2:05:30] brain from being exposed to toxic materials, but these drugs can cross that barrier and then, what the aya experience really is, is a slow release DMT trip, that instead of taking five minutes, takes about two and a half hours; and if you really know your psyched and your breath control techniques, on ayahuasca, over an hour or so [2:06:00]

Transcribed by Joe O’Neal


Transcribed by Joe O’Neal

Instead of taking 5 minutes, it takes about two and a half hours. And if you really know your psychedelics, and your breath control techniques, on ayahuasca, over an hour [02:06:00] or so, you can work yourself to a place where you say, “lordy me!It looks just like a dmt flash”. And it does, but you have to do some hard climbing to get there. With dmt itself, once you push the start button there is no stopping it. And… I think it's worth describing it. How many people have had this experience? Ahun.. well they can somewhat anchor it [02:06:30]. Ahh.. it’s very subjective, obviously. But I will describe what happened to me and then we can work out from there. One point that I wanna make about these things is that, th- the great strength of the psychedelic possibility is, it’s democratic, you know. It isn’t that the people of great spiritual advancement obtain these states, or- or people who have studied under some [02:07:00] lineage. It’s truly available to everyone and when I had my dmt experiences I realized, you know, either I am incredibly special, which doesn’t- there is no other evidence to support that *audience laughter*, or, this is something which can happen to anyone and that’s the more interesting possibility. After all if it can only happen to very very special people, then [02:07:30] that lefts- most people out. But if it’s generally available then it’s big big news about the human condition. Yeah-

Audience: [inaudible]

TM: How did they find DMT in the human brain? Ahh... hmm... interesting question.

Audience: [inaudible] how it crosses the blood brain barrier?


Audience: [inaudible] how it crosses the blood brain barrier?

[02:08:00]

TM: No I think he means how did they find that it was endogenously produced. Well, I think they were studying- the group that did this was at the University of Louisiana, Christian and his group. And I- they were studying fast reactions in the brain. And for fast reactions you have to look at chemicals that can go through some kind of cycle of structural change and return to their zero point, very very quickly. [02:08:30] Their original thought was that DMT mediated attention. I mean I am talking to you right now, suppose there were a loud noise over here, we would all immediately project our mind on to the source of the sound. Th- They thought that was a.. neurological function mediated by DMT. Could be, I am not sure I suspect it has to do more with the chemistry of dreaming.[02:09:00] Once they discovered DMT and began to track it, they discovered that there was a circadian rhythm, means a daily rhythm in its production in the human organism and that it reaches its greatest concentration in the brain around 3:30 am in most people. Well this is when the deep dreaming and high rem states are really chugging, and I suspect, I mean lucid dreamers may wanna argue with this [02:09:30] but I suspect that every night we go deeper places than we can ever speak of. That ordinary dreams are right on the surface of consciousness. Big lucid dreams are an inch deeper. But I think we go a hundred feet down every night into places where you cannot say anything about it. Yeah-

Audience: [inaudible] [02:10:00]

[02:10:04]


[02:10:04]

TM: Ah.. let’s make that perspiration *laughter*. Well its- [audience inaudible]. It’s hard as hell to find DMT. And this is a puzzle because if you look it up in a standard work on organic chemistry, it presents it as a trivial synthesis. Ah.. much [02:10:30] more simple than LSD which it always presents as quite a difficult synthesis. But when you actually talk to workbench chemists- it’s tricky to make DMT. It’s especially tricky to carry out the final crystallization. So what you are usually offered in the underground is some kind of muck, which looks sort of like ah.. maple syrup, half gone to sugar. I wouldn’t get near that, actually. It means [02:11:00] they- they botched their synthesis. What you are hoping for, is a white powder. However, in thirty years of chasing this all over the world I have only seen it as a white powder a couple of times. Usually, the synthesis has fallen slightly below that standard and what you get is a pale yellow powder, sometimes a pale rose or pink powder and then the real rough trade [02:11:30] is orange. And this what you- if you have seen it, this is probably what you have seen it. It looks like orange moth balls and it has the smell of indole. This very sharp smell which if you are not a chemist and you have never smelled indole, when you reach in your mind for what is this like, you will say, “well it’s sort of like moth balls”. Not quite, but it has that same sharp chemical, you know and this is what you are gonna smoke, see. So a lot of people beef about [02:12:00] that and say, you know, “It’s like smoking burning plastic”.


Transcribed by Rohan Singh

A lot of people beef about that, and say; “it’s like smoking burning plastic.”. Mehhh, Más o menos, It is a little bit like that. The other objection to DMT that has been around since the 60’s is people say it ‘destroys brain cells’. There’s no evidence for or against this. But I would submit to you as[inaudible] as the people who are neurophysiologists can argue with this if they disagree, but, I think an excellent index for the low toxicity of a drug is how fast it clears your system, and DMT clears your system in about 15 minutes. If you take some compound drug, or whatever, and 48 hours later you’re still taking hot baths, and uh, wishing you could have a message, and sitting staring at the wall. Than, this drug is really sticking to your ribs. It means that your metabolic pathways have no way of dealing with it, they can’t grab it here, they can’t grab it there, and it takes a long time to leave your system. An example of this in the pseudo-psychedelic domain would be ketamine. Ya’ know, ketamine, the experience lasts about 45 minutes, but 48 hours later you can feel your knees suddenly go rubbery, or you can have, what are technically called ‘fuse states’, strange states of disconnectedness from what’s going on around you. This is not a very good advertisement for a drug. TM speaking to audience: Here, this woman and then-.

Audience: Uhm, [inaudible question about ayahuasca].


Audience: Uhm, [inaudible question about ayahuasca].

™: Uh, well, less because um, if you smoke DMT the dose is approximately 50 milligrams, which is like the size of a kitchen match head. If you combine it with an MAO inhibitor and take it orally, you can probably get away with about 35 milligrams, of DMT. Uh, and, uh, oh I don’t know, 100 milligrams of harmaline, now harmaline is itself is sometimes itself described as a psychedelic drug, I really think this is sort of misleading. You will have hallucinations if you take pure harmine, but only at doses approaching the toxic dose. Many compounds will give you hallucinations approaching the toxic dose; bee venom, rattlesnake venom, stuff like this. That doesn’t mean it’s a hallucinogenic drug, it means you’re dying, and you should take steps to correct the situation. [™ speaking to audience]: Um, now, yes.

Audience: You say that there is a short transit time, but how long does the memory of that experience last? Because that would indicate to me that there is still a presence, and perhaps a homeopathic dose at that point[laughing], in the mind, in the brain.


™: Well, DMT, uh one of the things that caused me to think that is must- that is might have a role in the chemistry of dreaming, is that one of the frustrating things about it is, you have this experience without doubt, the most bizarre, appalling, peculiar experience you could possibly have; that’s at minute 2. At minute 5, you’re raving about it. At minute 7, you can’t remember it. So, it’s literally like gold running through your fingers. You say ‘this is the most amazing thing, this is the most amazing thing.. What am I talking about?’, and you know how you can have a very engaging complex dream, and the alarm goes off, and by the time your feet hit the floor you’re grasping for it, it’s literally melting before your eyes. That’s a very DMT-like presentation. The way a dream melts away is the way a DMT trip melts away, at the same speed.

[inaudible audience question]


[inaudible audience question]

™: Well, uh, over time and using tricks you can drag a certain amount of data out of it. Um, what I’ll do- I’ll describe a DMT trip, and it’s um, it’s a composite of maybe 40 of these trips, and uh, then you can see what you make of it. So this is- I’ll just describe it, I’ll be the graduate student UB, the guy with the clipboard. You’re saying to me ‘so what happened?’. Okay, here’s what happened; [dramatic sigh] You- I took 1 takes. Eh, most people can get off in about 2 to 4 hits. Now there’s a trick to it, hash smokers are greatly favored in the endeavour because you really need leather lungs, for this. The great problem is that people will cough, or not be able to hold it in. You take 2 hits in a situation where you’re clothes have been loosened and you can just flop backward, uh, when you need to. You take 2 hits, now many people miss the point. Because after 2 hits you feel completely peculiar, you feel as though your body is undergoing some strange kind of anesthesia. All the air has been pumped out of the room, this is the visual acuity thing I talked about last night.

Transcribed by Justin Symbiosis Brosey

[2:17:57]


Transcribed by Justin Symbiosis Brosey

[2:17:57]

All the air has been pumped out of the room. This is the visual acuity thing I’ve talked about last night. The colors jump up. The edges sharpen. It’s and at that point people say ‘ooh wow, it’s really coming on strong.’ And then what you have to do you is you have to take one more enormous hit. This separates the in trepid from the casual. Believe me. Because most ppl, and, and, the facilitator doesn’t want to lean on the person you say ‘you know, take the third hit’ and they say i completely weird, and sai know you feel weird take the third hit well if you can coax somebody into that. what happens is you close your eyes and you see the ordinary warm, brown, back, you know, closed eyelid scenario, and then these colors begin racing together. And it forms this mandelic, floral, slowly rotating thing. Which I call the chrysanthemum.

This is a place in the trip that you want to see as you go by it. The chrysanthemum forms. And you watch it for like 15 seconds. If it doesn’t give way then you didn’t do enough. You have to do more, one more hit.,usually will do it. Well then what happens is it physically propels you through this chrysanthemum-like thing and you, there’s a sound like a saran wrap bread wrapper being crumpled up and being thrown away, You know that crackle. A friend of mine says there a radio intellectai leaving through the anti fonital at the top of your head


I don’t know what it is, uh, but it’s it’s something is being.[audience] Yea right that’s what it is. Uh, then there’s this very, uh, very defined sense of bursting through something. A membrane. And on the other side, and this is now remember my experience, on the other side, as you break through there’s a cheer. There’s uh uh uh a whole bunch of entities waiting on the other side. And they you know that Pink Floyd song, The Gnomes have learned a new way to say Hooooorray . Well, it’s that place. It’s those gnomes.

And you burst into this space and uhm and they’re saying. “How wonderful that you’re here. You come so rarely. We’re so delighted to see you.” And the, one of the things about DMT that’s really puzzling is in a sense it doesn’t affect your mind. In other words, you don’t change. For instance if you take ketamine the first thing you notice, the very first thing you notice before the trip hits, is you notice that you no longer are anxious that you’ve taken ketamine. You’ve just sort of anxiety leaves you. That means it’s affecting your mind. It’s doing something to the judgemental machinery. DMT doesn’t lay a hand on the judgemental machinery. You, you break through into that space exactly who you were before you breaking through. And the usual reaction of most people is something like, you know, you think, God. Heart beat’s normal. Pulse, normal. Everything’s normal, yea, everything’s normal, oh god, because these things are there and they’re hammering at you and they come forward they’re like jeweled self-dribbling basketballs.


And they’re there are many of them. And they come pounding toward you and they will stop in front of you and vibrate, but then they do a very disconcerting thing which is they jump into your body. They jump into your body and then they jump back out again. And, the whole thing is going on in this very high speed mode where you’re being presented with thousands of details per second and you can’t get a hold on you say my god what’s happening and these things are saying, ‘don’t abandon yourself to amazement.’ Which is exactly what you want to do it. You just want go nuts with how crazy this is. You they ‘don’t do that, don’t do that. Pay attention, pay attention to what we’re doing.’

Well, what are they doing? Well, what they’re doing is they’re making object with their voices. They’re singing structures into existence. These things are, and what they’ll do is they’ll come toward you, and then, you have to understand they don’t have arms so we’re kind of downloading this into another dimension to even describe it. But what they do is they offer things to do. They say, ‘look at this. Look at this.’ And as your attention goes towards these objects you realize that what you’re being shown is impossible. It’s impossible. It’s not simply intricate, beautiful and hard to manufacture. It’s impossible to make these things. The nearest analogy would be faberge eggs. [2:24:00]

Transcribed by James Clayton


Transcribed by James Clayton

The nearest analogy would be to faberge eggs, or something like that. But these things are like the toys that are scattered around the nursery of a U.F.O. or something. Celestial toys and they are, the toys themselves appear to be somehow alive. The toys themselves can, uh, sing other objects into existence. So, what’s happening is there’s just this proliferation of elf gifts. [2:24:30] And the elf gifts are moving around singing, and the whole thing is directed towards, they’re saying, ‘Do what we are doing’, and they are very insistent.


They say, “Do it. Do it. Do it!” And you feel like a bubble, or, and now this is subjective, i mean only you know 5% report this but it happens to me. You feel like a bubble inside your body that’s beginning to move up [2:25:00] towards your mouth and when it comes out it isn’t sound it’s vision. You begin, you see, discover, that you can pump stuff out of your mouth by singing and they’re urging you to do this they say ‘That’s it, that’s it, keeping doing it!’ And the whole thing is like, you know, we’re now at minute 4.5 with this stuff...and, uh, you speak in a kind of glossolalia. [2:25:30] There’s a spontaneous outpouring of syntax unaccompanied by what is normally called meaning. It’s sort of, uh, [speaking in tongues]. And this is accompanied by a, a modality something seen. [2:26:00] And they say, ‘Yes, do it do it do it’ and then after a minute or so of this the whole thing begins to collapse in on itself and they literally begin to physically move away from you. And usually their final shot is, they actually wave goodbye, and they say, ‘Deja vu. Deja vu.’ Which makes no sense at all if you analyze it.


So then you come down, and you’re now at minute 6 to 7, and [2:26:30] you come down and it’s like being more loaded than you ever been. It’s like a 700 mic acid trip, but you embrace it as you're totally down. You say I’m totally down. I mean you look, you look like a termite a from Arcturus and the room is decorated in Amish quilts but I’m completely back! [audience laughs] And then over a minute or a minute and a half or so, the room comes right back together [2:27:00] and and 4 minutes after that, some people can give no account of it whatsoever. They say, uh, i don’t, idk it’s the weirdest thing that ever happened to me and i can’t remember it now, and uh. Uh. So that’s the basic run-though, now a lot of stuff is going on in there.


First of all, you know, what are these things? [2:27:30] uh, And why do they want you to do this strange activity? and what’s so great about it? Well, hmm, uh, well, first of all, who are these things? Uh, we can like you know be good scientists and make a list of the possibilities and then see which seems more likely. They could be a disincarnate [2:28:00] race of hyper-dimensional dwellers who live in some kind of parallel continuum just over some kind of energy, uh, barrier and they’re there all the time. You do have the feeling that they're there all the time. That its on going. That you just cut in on their scene. So that’s one possibility. Another possibility is that behind all these psychedelics, and especially dmt [2:28:00] that this is not a drug at all , but it is uh essentially uh uh a pay telephone of some sort to aliens. Good old National Inquirer type aliens, uh,


Good old National Inquirer type aliens, uh, who have, are using this as uh, as uh, a communication domain. Say you know we can’t land on the White House lawn, that would create panic and hysteria, so let’s create a drug which inside the drug [2:29:00]we will be able to deal with people. And, um, I was hoping that John Mac who's an expert on uh UFO abductions would be here this weekend. I expected him because I think this whole abduction thing is not going to be illuminated until they start giving abductees DMT and saying, So is this is what happened to you? Was it like this? or was it completely, uh, different? Well so then there are those [2:29:30] are the two possibilities that I sort of dealt with over the first 10 or 15 years of thinking about this, and then recently.


[Question from audience]

TM: It could be, what puzzles me is that the, the, abduction thing is so non-psychedelic. It’s so cut and dried and all this anal examination stuff with strange machinery [2:30:00] there’s nothing comparable to that , I’m happy to report to you.

Transcribed by James Clayton

There’s nothing comparable to that , I’m happy to report to you… [Audience laughs] ...uh, going on in the DMT thing. But it may be, you see...it..bec-

Audience: maybe the...the (inaudible)explains what it does to you…

™: Well, I’d be interested in looking at the possibility that DMT, under normal or abnormal conditions, could be sequestered in the human brain and then some unusual stimulus or stress could cause it to suddenly be dumped[2:30:30]...and, (audience inaudible) yeah.. .

Audience: I want to share this: There have been some migraines that I’ve had where, you know, what you just described with the colours coming in (inaudible)...it’s been so fascinating that I’ve completely forgotten about the pain and I’ve just watched it for hours, well or I guess I just fell asleep but it sort of struck a note... and I was always under a lot of stress when I got the headache in the first place and there seemed to be a lot of strange things going on with the migraine in the first place. So I’m wondering if that’s [2:31:00](inaudible)...


™: Yeah, that’s an interesting possibility. I also have migraines or the kind called cluster headaches and yes, a lot of the sympto - or the nice thing about DMT is that it’s painless but the sense of being split open; and of the traveling skeptomita transcribers note: I don’t know what this is and I can’t seem to google up anything using a variety of spellings and whatnot - I think he meant “scotoma”…, as they call these hallucinations that the migraine people see: it’s related in some way. Yeah. yeah.


Audience: May I bring science into this a little bit? (™: Sure.) Um. It involves the principle that its characteristically called “phasing” [2:31:30]Ah - But its - ah- it’s basis is sort of what happens on a subatomic level between matter and energy. It turns out there’s no fundamental part(?) at that level. They have this dance between matter and energy. You know, energy coalesces into a bit of matter which then becomes energy...ah - and you can look at this matter/energy relationship as having a wavelength of frequency associated with it. [2:32:00]Now granted this is happens on a subatomic level but if there’s something comparable going on, on the level at which we seem to exist in this physical form then it seems to me that there has to be something akin to it. That, it may be that we as beings are sort of tuned to a frequency range, you know, in this particular form and that somehow it’s possible to shift that,


form and that somehow it’s possible to shift that, or expand it to so that what we’re actually experiencing is a broader range of frequency, sort of shift in wavelength[2:32:30]...and I think some of this, of these experiences can be at least explored in that context. Ah……...you know…..there’s so much that we don’t know (inaudible)(™: Ain’t that the truth?) of this cosmos that, ah... but we can take...we can extrapolate (I’m pretty sure Terence sigh/groans here) to some degree We can use this to take journeys and explore this possibility. What we DO know, in science for example[2:33:00], what happens on a subatomic level...and... I mean, for god’s sake, the language of these people is sounding more like sorcerers, these days, than scientists.(™: Ah. Uh huh. Mmmhmm.) and we do seem to, at least, believe from the evidence that we see that there is this matter energy interchange on a very


that there is this matter energy interchange on a very fundamental level; while something is going on on that fundamental level. There may be this, principle of “phasing” which will either shift our tuning [2:33:30]or expand to include a larger spectrum.


™: Yeah, I think...no I think that that’s a very interesting avenue to pursue, this thing about frequency. Somebody told me: one of the great things about this job iis you hear a lot of weird stories, and somebody told me a story recently about, it didn’t involve DMT; it involved LSD but this guy and a friend of his took a quite large dose of LSD, larger than they intended and they went to a party.[2:34:00] And they were so loaded by the time they got to the party that they realized they could not function as party goers so they just moved into a corner and sat with their backs to the wall and watched this party rage in front of them. And after about 20 minutes of sitting there they both simultaneously noticed it was a dance party; noticed that the music was sounding[2:34:30] really strange and everybody was moving very slowly. And as they watched the thing came to an absolute halt. And people were just


thing came to an absolute halt. And people were just frozen. And there was absolute silence. And at that point - ah - the door, at the other end of the room, swung open and, ah, an elf? Entered the room and moved among[2:35:00] all these frozen people and then left, by the door he came in and they both saw this and they said that they could tell that it was, that it - it - it - the people in the room didn’t know it happened because for them it occupied a micro-second. But this thing that was, you know, in Carlos Castaneda who, God knows is not the most reliable reporter on these things, nevertheless there is this thing about stopping the world. So. Maybe it’s something like that.[2:35:30] That there is, as you suggest, a frequency phase (Audience: inaudible) Yeah. This sort of leads into the third possibility, having to do with the origin of these things. And, in a sense, this is the hardest


And, in a sense, this is the hardest one to swallow but, in another sense, this is the most conservative (in some crazy notion of conservative); the most conservative explanation (clears throat) because (Audience: inaudible question) (™ drinks: Mm.mm.(no))[2:36:00]


Transcribed by Artemis Jones

[2:36:00] Because, uhm, we have no evidence other than the tabloids that this world is being visited by friendly visitors from zubenelgenubi or zeta reticuli or the pleiades or anywhere else. I mean, to my mind the evidence that this is happening is vanishingly small and totally underwhelming. Uh, the other possibility, uh, that, uh, [2:36:30] there is some kind of parallel dimension in which these things exist is also somewhat poorly supported. If we’re talking about something which thinks, something which can communicate, something which is intelligent, then we should look to ourselves as the source of it, because we are the only intelligent, communicating things we know within a certain narrow definition of these things.


So that, it’s occurred to me with greater and greater [2:37:00] force and largely prompted by giving DMT occasionally to Tibetans and Amazonian shamans, and when you say to them, you know, to the shamans in the Amazon, when you say to them “What is happening with this stuff? And what are those little things in there?” They say “Oh well those are ancestor spirits, didn’t you know? Haven’t you heard? Shamanism is about doing healing through the intercession of ancestor spirits.” You say hmm, [2:37:30] ancestor spirits, lets get this straight, dead people is what you’re talking about right? These are dead people. And, you know, maybe because I was raised catholic I resisted this like grim death. But I’m beginning to think that what you actually break into in that place, is something that we might call, uh, an ecology of souls. That, uh, is it possible to entertain [2:38:00] the notion that at death you actually don’t just become worm food, but that something, survives, in some other dimension, and that it has this bizarre character to it, and that this explains their peculiar affection for humanity, and their involvement, somehow in our, uh, fate. Well this is to me is fairly mind bending [2:38:30] as a possibility. If what is awaiting us at the end of the 20th century is the erasure of the boundary between the living and the dead, then we’ve all been too conservative in our projections of what is, uh, going on.

TM: [calls on audience member] Yeah?

Audience: [inaudible question]


TM: Yes, that there will be some kind of erasure of, uh, the boundary between the two. Well, once i had this idea, you know, [2:39:00] I mentioned my Jungian and art historical proclivities and so that means that you always looks back through tradition and folklore to try and find something analogous to this. Well, there ain’t much. But there is one area that seems suggestive to me, and that is, as you all know, the Irish are a-a, uh, very(fairy?) haunted race. They’re also an intoxication obsessed race, at least in stereotype. [2:39:30] Well it turns out, that, uh, you probably all are familiar with the notion of purgatory? Purgatory is the place where you have to spend a lot of time before you get to heaven, if you’re not bad enough to go to hell. So you put in a few [inaudible 2:39:50] of eternity in purgatory and then you get let into heaven. Well


and then you get let into heaven. Well i had always assumed that this dogma, [2:40:00] I don’t know i hadn’t really thought about it, I just sort of assumed it arose with early Christianity. But when I began looking into this I discovered that the idea of purgatory, was invented by Saint Patrick, and it was invented specifically to convert the pagan Irish, because the pagan Irish believed, uh, in the, in the land of fey. They believe that there was this nearby dimension, full of the souls of the dead, surrounding [2:40:30] us all the time, and that certain people with the gift of second sight could see this. So, Patrick just said to them, “Oh no, that isn’t it. It’s purgatory.” And was able to push that on them so successfully that a later church council adopted it as general dogma for the church, to use in converting the pagan Slavs as well. So, uh, it-it’s an idea


as well. So, uh, it-it’s an idea of, [2:41:00] uh, a nearby dimension, inhabited by disincarnate souls, that, uh, is apparently very old, but very alien to our tradition.


TM: Yes?

Audience: [inaudible] …It’s a gross oversimplification but it’s kind of related and it has to do with the quantum wave function, which is really kind of a dual wave, there’s two parts to it. Uh, one part, and they both have a temporal or time related aspect to it, one part which is called the ordinary [2:41:30] part of the wave, can be seen as a wave propagating forward in time. And the other half of the wave, which is called the complex conjugate, can be seen as propagating backwards in time, from some future state. Some past state, some future state, emitting waves which at some point interact and produce what is perceived by us as the present state, which is really a dynamic process in itself, there is no absolute present…[2:42:00]

Transcribed by Danny Hollman

[2:42:00]

Audience: But the interesting thing is that what that implies is that what we experience in the present whatever they may be is somehow related to some future state and some past state. But it also means that neither future or past are fixed and that we could sort of align ourselves with different tracks or vectors. You know, and a slightly different vector that’s slightly askew may produce something totally uh different [2:42:30] than what our ordinary perception would be. What do you think?

TM: Well, yeah, This could be. I mean, I’ve always felt that that what biology is, is some weird kind of chemical strategy for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy. That you know, that macrophysical objects are not subject to quantum mechanical indeterminacy. But organisms apparently are, especially thinking organisms.

[2:43:00]


[2:43:00]

Audience: We don’t know. That’s our perception. Our perception is that, is that objects on the macro scale are to scale, are not subject to quantum fluctuations. But that’s only because uh of this probability wave in some sense, in that, that there’s a most probable state. And if we happen to exist in that, that our perception is that it, it’s more fixed . That there is no indeterminacy, that [2:43:30] it obeys certain laws that are rather linear in nature. Uh, but we really don’t know.

TM: What you’re sort of saying is that the natural laws only apply some of the time, which gives them a curious status as laws in that case.

Audience: Yeah, (inaudible) but to broaden the notion of relativity. Uh, I mean, what happens in a black hole for example, what is singularity? It simply means that the laws that normally apply in everyday experience no longer are relevant.

[2:44:00]

TM: Well, one of the problems cosmology is meeting [2:44:00] is that there are so many large black holes in the universe that you come up with you know, ten high six singularities.That’s a few more singularities than a good theory would tolerate, I would think. I mean, what kind of theory is it that hands you back ten to the ninth singularities? Which are exceptions to the theory?

Audience: That’s true, but a lot of that is based on assumptions that are stretches.

[2:44:30]

TM: Ain’t that the truth (laughs.)


[2:44:30]

TM: Ain’t that the truth (laughs.)

Audience: Again if we get back to a psychedelic experience, you know, it’s this whole lower dimensional language slice thing that we seem to have to operate in in order to describe an experience that just does not fit with that slice. You know, we do our best to do it, you know and sometimes it comes across being very crude and niave. Sometimes it kind of gets close to the mark, but it’s difficult to know. Ah, I mean the whole notion of black hole singularities is just [2:45:00] the present attempt at explaining some of the theory that is beyond ordinary experience. None of us encounter a black hole (inaudible.)

TM: That’s true. It seems to me one of the embarrassments of science is that the Big Bang begins with a singularity, And, so then, you have this whole vast interlocking schema of rational explanation, except that it begins [2:45:30] with a hard swallow. You’re asked to believe that the entire cosmos of space and time sprang from a point no larger than a cross-section of a gnat’s eyelash. Whatever else one could say about that theory, I’d think you’d agree, it’s the limit case for credulity!

Audience: Oh, absolutely!

TM: I mean if you believe that, try to think of something that you would throw up your hands and say, “Well, I’m not buying that!” (laughs) [2:46:00] It absolutely, it’s sort of like when you join the Catholic Church you make a declaration of faith. Well when you join Science you sort of make this declaration of faith that, “I do believe that the universe sprang in a single instant from an incredibly tiny, hot, dense dot!” Unlikely, but, who knows?


Audience: Here’s something else. As you two were dialoguing a bit I was getting a visualization of, you have to look at the pond of reality [2:46:30] so to speak, as not only being the um visual of someone throwing a pebble from the top of the pond and creating the ripple effect of waves, but also from the bubbles coming from below. And to me the deep space that you were talking about is the air inside the bubbles coming from below. And so the dimensional reality of that picture is not a linear time perspective. It’s something coming from all directions. It is again the center of the mandala itself.

[2:47:00]


[2:47:00]

TM: Well, this is why I say the psychedelic experience is a boundary dissolving experience because it takes away past, present, cause, effect, all of these things uh disappear. Now remember I said ayahuasca is a kind of slow release DMT trip. And one of the really interesting things going on with ayahuasca to my mind, perhaps the most interesting thing, is that the style in the Amazon of taking [2:47:30] ayahuasca is uh people get together in a darkened hut at night, and they take it and the sing. But the songs, their selling them at the table back there, the songs, when there’s a break in the singing and you hear the people discussing the songs, they don’t discuss them like music, the discuss them. They discuss them like sculpture and painting. And they say to the Shaman “I like the part [2:48:00] with the gray bars and the blue speckling. But when you brought in the pink in combination with the beige and white I thought it was too much. Say what kind of a discussion is this about songs? You realize then when you take ayahuasca they see the songs. Now this is really interesting to me, you remember in the DMT flash they wanted you to use your voice to make objects.

Transcribed by Micki Garrison


… “I like the part with the great bars and the blue speckling, but when you brought in the pink in combination with the basen white I thought it was to much”. See, what kind of a discussion is this about a song? You realize then when you take Ayahuaska, they see the songs ah.. and now this is really interesting to me because, you remember in the DMT flash they wanted you to use your voice to make objects, well then in the Ayahuaska trance you use your voice to control these colored modalities and ah.. the whole thing is done that way, well so then what it must mean is that the neurophysiology of Ayahuaska somehow allows for the ordinary signal processing, which is being chanted into the audio pathway in the brain, is instead being chanted into the ossicle pathway, this is what's called a Synestesia. These things have been fascinating for hundreds of years to people but the synestesia means that, you know, color ah.. sounds are seen. Well, now


know, color ah.. sounds are seen. Well, now what was this anything other than a neurophysiologic curiosity? Well I maintain it is, because I think that a language which could be seen, would be a kind of telepathic language. If you thought much about telepathy, you might have naively assumed that telepathy is you hearing me think. That isn't what it is, I think. Telepathy is you seeing what I mean. And it's not something which happens dramatically, it is a function of eloquence, you know, first you have the speaker who that is boring you to death, then you have the speaker who at least holds your attention, then you have the speaker of who may had said, she paints the picture. It means we're moving toward poetry. Well it's possible to imagine a transformation of the neural processing of language, it may be a behavioral possibility, it may not even require a gene shift. Where then we would see what we each mean. You know there's this


see what we each mean. You know there's this persistent idea, promulgated by Robert Graves in the White Goddess, among other people, that there was once what he calls a Orshba(?) a primal language so emotionally intense that, to be in the presence of poetry declaimed in this language, is to see the poetry and that this is what the last poetics of the high paleolithic were about and probably it was pharmacological assisted that you can gather people in the presence of a great bard, or singer, and that person could then create telepathic modalities, and that telepathic modality, that richer more unifying language was the thing which was suppressing the formation of ego. The ego speaks and hears through sound, the super-ego projects images and is perceived as images. Now it's very interesting, at least to me, that in the pineal gland of ordinary human beings there is a compound called Adeneroglomerotropine which, when analyzed in inorganic or just in the normal nomenclature of organic


inorganic or just in the normal nomenclature of organic chemistry, turns out to be ah..a betacarboline closely related to harmaline. Well is it possible that we are as close as a one gene mutation away from a shift that would switch our processing of audio input into the visual field and that then we would cross over into a realm of beheld understanding, and that this is the evolutionary leap that we're trying to make that is in the body, not in the technology, in the body. There's is actually going to be a minor, a one gene click to another channel and then we will be able to see what we mean and I maintain that if you can see what somebody means, you are that person, contrasted.. contrasted to ordinary communication. Ordinary communication is achieved through ah.. small mouth noises, as primates we have a throat and voice ar.. a voice box arrangement that allows us to produce small mouth noises at.. for hours if's necessary and I’m the living proof of it ah...


necessary and I’m the living proof of it ah... but it's not a very efficient mode of communication because what happens is, I have a though by looking a culturally sanctioned dictionary which I have copied into my head. I translate the thoughts into an acoustical signal using my mouth which moves across space, which enters your ears. Your rush to your interior dictionary and you construct my meaning out of your dictionary. Now notes that this process rests on a very shaky assumption, it rests on he assumption that your dictionary and my dictionary were published by he same folks in he same year. If your dictionary is different from mine, you will not correctly reconstruct my meaning and we we'll have what we call misunderstanding. Notes how among us...


Transcribed by Nicole Pralaya

[2:54:00]

TM: most bring down things you can say to somebody is, would you explain to me what I`ve just said?

Because it means, oh boy here comes trouble, now you're gonna find out, that you know, people didn't understand you. They horribly misunderstood and and the uh communication is very provisional the amount of noise in the circuit is huge. Well then contrast this to, I utter something [2:54:30] and it condenses as a sculpture in the air and you and I then become its observers and we rotate this syntactical object and we look at it, we regard it from many points of view.

This is not ambiguous or its certainly considerably less ambiguous than this reconstruction from interiorized dictionaries. So perhaps what all this is about is evolutionary pressure on our languages to become visual and therefore to become more unitfied and less riddled with noise which creates misunderstanding, which creates horrible social realities yeah.

[question from the audience] I just remember reading a book called Holographic Universe

TM: oh Michael Talbots book uhuh

[question continues] he was talking about uh visual experiences being about fifty percent based on [inaudible from audience] and addition internally to to you know what coming to visual[2:55:30] it sounds like a transmission problem translation

TM: y yes although what you could do with a visible language would be very challenging we could do many things with it it is not an outlandish, it's not a completely outlandish idea. In nature it occurs, there's this fa there's a wonderful [2:56:00] hexonomenon in nature which is worth talking about to sort of legitimate such a far out notion which is as you all probably know um octopi uh can change color, this is one of those things you learn on those science specials on tv.


[transition from tape 2 to 3]

TM: Octopi can change color [2:56:30] well most people I think, assume that they do this for camouflage, that would be a reasonable assumption. They don't do it for camouflage uh let's talk about octopi for just a moment. First of all they're mollusk, they divided from our evolutionary line seven hundred million years ago, they are related to escargot uh they have no backbone for crying out loud they're not even vertebrates

uh [2:57:00] But what is always said by biology classes about octopi is that they're a wonderful example of parallel evolution because their optical system is very much like a mammalian optical system. well why is this? Well it's because they've evolved in a in an environment uh the reef environment that is a um all is dense with signals as a rainforest is and uhm [2:57:30] an octopus is soft bodied it cannot only change color but it can also change its surface from smooth and rubbery to bumpy, pimply, rugose, ribbed so forth and so on and also because it is soft bodied and in an aqueous environment it can fold and unfold and reveal and conceal parts of its body very very quickly. [2:58:00] Well all of these uh behaviors and physiological characteristics go together to make the octopus an excellent visual communicator and the color changes the blushes travelling dots and bars that these creatures manifest and the squid do it too uh are language and if you're interested in this there is a wonderful book by a guy named Moyniham called Communication and non communication among [2:58:30] the Cephalopodidia


and he goes as far as creating a a grammar for this stuff. Well so then in a way you know if you pull back from the mundane assumptions about this what's happening is the octopus wears its mind on its skin. It is dressed in its mental state e one octopus encountering another can tell [2:59:00] its mood, how recently its eaten, how recently it's had sex, whether it`s ovulating all by looking and so they the only way an octopus can have a private thought is by squirting ink into the water and then hiding inside it. This is essentially it is correction fluid for misspoken octopi you see [audience laughs] so in a sense this is what we are are being beckoned [2:59:30]

toward that we want to clothe ourselves in language, we do it to a degree in a funny way. I mean if you wanna think about virtual reality this is a virtual reality all this stuff these fixtures the architecture the infrastructure the road, these are ideas it was an idea and then it has been summoned into matter by the allotment of funds the spending of money the hiring [3:00:00]

Transcribed by Arsen Vidakovic


Transcribed by Arsen Vidakovic

..the spending of money, the hiring [3:00:00] of craftsmen, so forth and so on. Our whole civilization is an excreted set of interlocking ideas, agreements. We’re like choral animals, and we somewhere, you know, there’s this naked, pulpy creature, but, you know, clothed in denim, clothed in, uhm, harder shell produced by Mercedes or Chevrolet, moving around inside the larger environment, produced by the state of Colorado, and so forth and so on. So I think octopi offer an excellent metaphoric example of what naked-mindedness would be. And some of these octopi, uhm, [3:00:45] as i said, they evolved in the, uhm, coastal reef domain. But that’s a very competitive domain. Everybody in the ocean wants to be there, because that’s where the sunlight and the food is.

So if you’re smart you’ll try and evolve into a more hostile niche. And some of these octopi have become what are called benthic, or abyssal. It means, they exist in the parts of the ocean where light never reaches.

[inaudible from audience].