Transcribed Sheree Geo

[5:06:00] is the simplest assumption, try it first and see if it works. But I maintain that you know science has in certain areas been very slow to make progress in the social domain in econometrics in ahh.. the you know.. multiple body problems and stuff like that. Well I think this is because this simple assumption, that time is an invariant [5:06:30] has to be reexamined. I would also re- .. I would offer a new definition of science; science is that field of human endeavour which studies phenomenon so crude that they are time invariant. You know, the .. the hydrogen atom cleaves from the oxygen atom the same way every time, but love affairs don’t come apart the same way every time, [5:07:00] bankruptcy’s don’t occur the same way every time. These are complex, compound phenomena that are then influenced by the temporal variables and the variables embedded in the environment around them. Now the problem is these are the things that we are interested in, love affairs, bankruptcy and the establishment of empire. Very few people have a passionate interest in the dynamics of the water molecule.

[Audience Member Inaudible] [5:07:30]

Oh, now i know I have you on the run because this is a uhh .. but it makes pretty things argument

[Audience Member Inaudible]

Well see I think science is a great enterprise and noble but not the arbitrator of truth

[Audience Member Agrees?]

There are no arbitrary of truth, the truth of the turow, the truth of quantum physics, these are [5:08:00] truths, in the supermarket of truth but y- there's no .. there's no uhhh top end to that process. There may not even be one truth.

[Audience Inaudible]


[Audience Inaudible]

In a given situation. If you’re flipping coins probability theory is probably a good guide, you wouldn’t want to run your love affair on probability theory uhh so you have to choose the domain [5:08:30] you have to recognise the applicable models, the applicable tools for whatever domain you’re looking at.

[audience member inaudible]

Well you .. you're allowed to be a heretic you just don’t get paid well, that's the price you pay for that, still .. yeah.

[audience member inaudible]


No no.. No I don’t think it's bad, I thi- I’m entirely in support of whatever the universe is in the process of trying to do here ummm.. I think that.. uh.. I think that history is ending [5:10:00] and that it was a temporary perturbation of the system and that we can anchor ourselves through this chaos-trophy or whatever it is by going back to archaic models but I.. I think that and-.. you know.. this is what we'll talk about tomorrow when we get the computer because I don’t merely talk about it even though I have been flailing the mathematicians ultimately I too [5:10:30] come to rest with a fishy formula. I think that the universe is some kind… i think that there is something that there is overlooked by science called .. and i'll name it. Its called Novelty. The universe is a novelty conserving engine of some sort, from the very first nanoseconds after the big bang, novelty has been conserving itself and building newer and [5:11:00] deeper levels of novelty on novelty already achieved. So that uh .. you know in the first few m-.. i mean, you have the big bang then you have this era called the pre-physical era, its brief, it lasts the amount of time it takes light to cross a distance equivalent to the diameter of the proton, electron, something d- dinky for sure. That's called the era before physics, then [5:11:30] physics begins one jiffy after that and.. and the original universe was so hot that there were .. that it was a plasma of free electrons, so since it was a plasma, there was nothing you could called atomic physics because the ambient temperature was so high that electrons could not settle down into stable orbitals around nuclei. As the temperature [5:12:00] of the universe fell….


Transcribed by Luke Danton

[5:12:00] As the temperature of the universe fell, atomic systems crystallized out of that plasmic environment, well then ahh.. further cooling of the universe leads to more complex kinds of bonds and the cooking out of complex elements from stars, the original universe was made entirely of hydrogen, this hydrogen aggregated into masses so ahh.. dense, so large that at their center was actually -and if you think I’m not nervous in doing this in front of you, you're crazy- ([laughs], [audience laughs]) these aggregates of hydrogen, at the center it was so massive in temperature and pressure that fusion could actually begin, and fusion cooked out heavier elements: iron, sulfur and eventually carbon. When you get for violent carbon this throws open the doorway to tremendous new novelty, you get now for the first time, not atomic systems but molecular systems, these molecular systems lead into protobiological systems, protobiological systems lead into prokarya, then eukarya, then true higher multicellular animals, then mammals, then human beings, then electronic culture, then the big surprise.

Now the thing to notes about all this, is that novelty keeps building on novelty already achieved, it crosses biological lines, atomic lines, molecular lines, it is along the universe, i'm proposing, that novelty is conserved, and so then what we represent is a kind of ultimate nexus of novelty, and i believe that we are being wound tighter and tighter and tighter into a confrontation with the equivalent of the singularity at the center of a black hole, but it isn't a gravitational singularity that I’m talking about, it's a novelty singularity and so you know the universe is growing toward some kind of ultimate state of boundaryless hyper-connectivity and when that is achieved the process will cease to be describable in the logos of ordinary space-time and energy.


Now science has no notion of this concept of novelty. In the East there is such a concept it’s called Dao, and Dao builds things up and pulls them down according to its own mysterious laws. Tomorrow I will argue when we get the computer that its laws are not in fact entirely mysterious and that we can discover ah.. the nature of the novelty constant, and instead of treating space-time as an absolutely featureless plain, we can take that zero value which is how that shows up in the Newtonian mechanics, and substitute instead a fractal dimension number which will be some kind of decimal fraction between one and two, and then this will allow us to do things previously inconceivable like predict the future and stuff like that. See of one thing I guess i should say since we started drifting into this fairly radi place is the idea that the universe is ahh… growing toward itself, it's not moving outward from its origin, its moving toward its completion and this is called teleology, its very unwelcome in most scientific modeling, but that's a legacy from the nineteenth century where they were so concerned to get god out of the picture that they wanted everything to happen through one random process colliding with another random process and flipping out newer deal elephants and redwood trees, but in principle we don't have to believe in god to believe in an attractor at the end of the process, we see many kinds of attractors in the natural world.


One way that I think of the psychedelic experiences is – you know you heard me talk about hyperspace, super-space, this kind of thing- it really does seem to me that reality is some kind of a very complex geometric object of some sort and you know how they teach you in trigonometry that all possible ellipses can be obtained by sectioning a cone, and that if you take the infinite set of ellipses and reconstruct them you can reconstruct the cone. Well the way I think of psychedelics and psychedelic tripping is you are sectioning a hyperdimensional object and what you're coming back with is a lower dimensional map of this higher dimensional object. Well everybody has a different map in the same way that there are infinite number of elliptical sections of a cone, but they're all generated by the same object and if it's a mystery to you how a simple fine-eyed object like a cone can generate an infinite number of elliptical sections then it's going to be hard [5:18:00] for you to understand how everybody can have a different psychedelic trip and yet be actually dealing with the same ahh.. reality in hyperspace.

Transcribed by Nicole

™:[3:18:00]


Transcribed by Nicole

™:[3:18:00]

There is no way to find out of course, cause they are all dead, but there are certain episodes in the evolution of western culture that suggest that people may be much more plastic than we ordinarily suppose.First example uhh would be : How can it be that in the middle 1500s perspective was discovered.I mean, how do you discover perspective?[3:18:30] This is very hard, I think, for modern people to understand because uuh it’s a given for us.I mean we see in perspective.We accept it as a quality of the world rather than uh a cultural artifact put in place at a certain moment.But in fact, during the renaissance only the most inspired people could uhh.. paint in perspective on the natch.[3:19:00] Most people, they had complex devices called perspectographs that would project over the scene a receding grid and then people would essentially fill in the lines.


Now another example of this kind of thing that’s not so well known but that is an example that aii Marshall McLuhan makes a lot of is saint Augustine- the great father of the Christian church.He had a reputation for being[3:19:30] a very holy man and the accounts of his contemporaries say that a way that people would satisfy themselves that saint Augustine had a pipeline to god, is that they would bring him scripture, the Bible essentially, and open it in front of him and let him look at it and then they would close the book and question him about what was there and he could always tell them.[3:20:00] And they were amazed!As far as we can tell st.Augustine was the only man in Europe who could read silently.Nobody else could do it, it was regarded as a miracle.[audience laughs].Now we all read silently and there may be few unfortunate individuals among us who move their lips while they read, but that’s the only [inaudible] trace we have of this previous cultural mode where everyone “to read” meant to read aloud.[3:20:30].No one could conceive any other way of doing it.


The logos seems to me a kind of similar thing.It was a mental behaviour, function, which, for reasons which are probably complex and unknowable, slipped out of reach.That’s why, it seems to me, the psychedelics are very close to being able to modify our behaviours along this kind of lines because ,[3:21:00] there are number of behavioral and experiential possibilities that we suppress.I mean I think it’s just uhh as an example of how little we know about what’s going on ahmm.Look at the Grafen…, I mean don’t look at it but conceive of the Gräfenberg spot : the G-spot.Now, we all know what this is, clearly people were looking for it for a long long time, how could they only discover it twelve years ago [3:21:30].I mean, if something that major can be overlooked than it is hard to IMAGINE what might have been overlooked, I mean that’s pretty central into the project of being a human being and apparently it was unknown until very very recently.So, uhhh yes- the Logos was probably uhh what I call Gaian mind.And that at a certain point in cultural development people [3:22:00] became so chuckleheaded that the Gaian mind had said:To hell with this! and then uh the voice fell silent.It fell silent right at the around the time of the birth of Christ eh .Right at the time of the [gia?] of the shift of this uh [inaudible] aeon, you know.

Audience: [inaudible question][3:22:30]

™:How it works with psilocybin?

Audience:[inaudible]


™:How it works with psilocybin?

Audience:[inaudible]

™: Well ahh, I mean I take when I take psilocybin I take it on an empty stomach, I don’t fast or anything like that, I just don’t eat for six hours- I don’t call that fasting.. Uhh, and then I take it in silent darkness.That’s number one - very important.The next thing is : weigh the dose.[3:23:00]

You must weigh the dose because 5 grams is what you want and I had over and over the experience of showing somebody what 5 grams is and they are appalled. They say : “MY GOD! YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS. I mean, I would uhh.. I take a fifth that much.A fourth that much.”

Yeah well, that’s the problem, that’s why you don’t have elves in the attic and bats in the belfry like I do uhh [audience laughter] [3:23:30] umm yo- you know.And so then you take it, and I take it on an empty stomach and a lot of people don’t like the taste.I don’t really understand that uhh.I just chew them up.I sit with them and I chew them up and then huh?

Audience :Dry?

™: Dry.And none of this mixing in applesauce or any of that malarkin.I mean what’s that about?[audience laughter]

Audience: [inaudible]

™:Oh well fresh- sixty grams.Sixty grams uhh [3:24:00] because there is more than a, you know, there is a huge water loss there.

Transcribed by Marko

T.M: ”eventually society will get around to exploiting this particular one just like it does everything else.

[audience question]


[audience question]

T.M: The drug is ibogaine the plant it comes from is tabernanthe iboga. Yeah?

[audience question “you mentioned combing the DMT with iboga, what what's the experience like, what is the change?]

T.M:: Mhm? well that's what ayahuasca is [5:24:31] you see the DMT is then not destroyed in your intestine and so you have a slow release DMT trip by doing that.

[audience q “Is that done with smoking DMT and ingesting ….]

T.M: Ahh, in in theory and probably in fact that would be a tremendously successful way to get very loaded the problem is it might be a too successful way you wanna be careful with these mao inhibitors - ther - there are mao inhibitors [5:25:01] that drug companies have produced where ah a single dose inhibits all the mao in your body for up to a month, this would be murder if you got around some DMT on that, uh the nice thing about harmine is that it’s fully reversible in four to six hours so it's ah it’s a gentle mao inhibitor, but yeah this is the strategy this is why you could conceivably take the [5:25:31] seeds of a plant like

inaudiable [5:24:33]

which grows around here more or less and ah and contains harmine and combine it with a plant like

inaudiable [5:25:43]

which contains DMT and come up with a north american pseudo ayascha of some sort, people are doing this but you know if you think, think it takes courage to just do these drug- these compounds na naturally imagine the kind of courage [5:26:02] it takes to diddle with recipes and to do your own


Bio Assay [5:26:06]

which you must do because the cook must taste the soup.

[Audience Q]

T.M: pa ga, Peganum harmala P-E-G-A-N-U-M Peganum Harmala in the

psycho falacity {5:26:21].

[Audience Q]

T.M: Well we never tried the experiment again [5:26:33] because ahh Dennis felt that he really made the maximum contribution [audience laughter] to the effort, ahh, there are many experiments though which could be tried, which would put no human being in danger, ahh for you know, for instance, you could use square wave generators which are acoustical generators to try and drive these drug molecules into dna [5:27:01] in

vetro

in a test tube you know you would what would you would do is simply put the denatured DNA into solution, put some dmt into the solution, shake it furiously, ultracentrifuge the mix to get the loose DMT out and then weigh the DNA and see if its weight has increased by a number which was magically divisible by the molecular [5:27:31] weight of the DMT molecule, these kinds of studies have been done and shows that DNA ah, DMT does intercalate and locate itself into DNA so yeah there are a lot of different things like that that could be done that wouldn’t put anyone at risk.

[Audience Q]


[Audience Q]

T.M: well, ahhl he doesn't remember it very clearly, he, his impression was [5:28:01] that it lasted about 5 days it actually lasted 3 weeks so the real staff that would have alarmed him he fortunately was to out of it to see or remember, but I was there throughout the whole thing and saw it, and uhm, I think it would be nice to understand the parameters of the effect a little more clearly before we charge off and try that particular trick again, yeah. {5:28:30]

[Audience Q]

T.M: Well this is what's being referred to is the in True Hallucinations which is a tape set which will be published as a book next year, it describes an expedition to the amazon in 1971 in which was really where we got the whammy, i mean its still, i'm still running on what happened from you know the 28th of february 1971to the 21st march the rest of my life is pretty much throw [5:29:01] away. [Audience Laughter] but ugh, wh - what he, I dunno it was weirder than flying saucer abduction because that now there's a whole form for it, it was hard to say something was waiting for us down in the amazon and as soon as we started taking these mushrooms, it began making suggestions about how you could use the mushroom and your voice and certain other materials present at hand in {5:29:32] tha that environment to essentially uhm well there aren’t even words to say what it was, condense the soul into three dimensional space, or ahh, create the philosopher's stone inside your body and then give birth to it or in other words some radical transformation of the ontology of being human was held out as a possibility and it all [5:30:01]


Transcribed by Jess Harse


TM: and it [5:30:00] all came down to an experiment that he wanted to perform that seemed to me so unlikely to have any effect whatsoever that I felt was perfectly alright to let this experiment go forward because I would have bet dollars to donuts that nothing would happen, instead all hell broke loose at the conclusion of this experiment and ahh you know he claimed that the time [5:30:31] that what he had done was bonded into my DNA ahh enough psilocybin in a superconducting kind of bond which if you know how superconductivity works, a superconductive bond is very hard to disrupt, it’s not like an ordinary chemical bond and he sell that you could do what he called bell the cat - that you could actually hang [inaudible] a transceiver around [5:31:00] the neck of the Logos itself and from then on it would talk to you constantly in the confines of your own mind, and it just seemed so wildly improbable to me that it


seemed so wildly improbable to me that it went forward but in fact at the conclusion of the experiment something changed in me, and I essentially became who I now appear to be, but before that I wasn’t, I was sort of a [inaudible] [5:31:30] and ahh undirected person of some sort and then the... tomorrow you will see when we get the computer what the bottom line of this is because what was eventually revealed was a kind of mathematical mandala of space and time that rested on its… for its veracity on the fact that it allowed, that it made prediction of the future possible and tomorrow afternoon I will display [5:32:00] this thing for you and you can judge for yourself whether this is the product of ahh pathological incident or in fact an intellectual leap comparable to Newton’s laws of motion or, or something like that. I think in principle all this is possible, I think transforming, you know, part of what Human History’s conclusion will be


know, part of what Human History’s conclusion will be is what I call ‘turning the human body inside out’ [5:32:30]; we want the soul to become visible, we want the body to become an idea, freely commanded in the imagination; and then at that point as James Joyce said ‘Man will be durgible (?)’, that was as close as he could get in 1939 to saying you’ll turn into a flying saucer, you know, he knew it was an airship, he knew it was [inaudible] but he thought it was a durgible (?) ahh anyway enough about La Chorrera maybe we’ll get into that tomorrow [5:33:01]. Yes?


Audience: [inaudible question]

TM: No. Good point. The vine contains the [inaudible] another plant contains the DMT, this makes Ayahuasca unique among this shamanic tools because, you see, all the rest of them - peyote, mushrooms, San Pedro, ibogaine, morning glories [5:33:30], and whatever else, cannabis - are simply plants which you ingest; Ayahuasca is a drug, a product, something made by pharmacologists, I mean pharmacologists who wear penis [inaudible] but pharmacologists nevertheless you see, so suddenly the Human dimension enters into it not all Ayahuasca is alike, Ayahuasca depends on the personality of the person who made it [5:34:00], so it’s not about the relationship between you and the plant when you take Ayahuasca; between you and the plants there stands a Human being and, you know, if you’re headed down there to seriously get into this, don’t, don’t give up in a hurry, you will drink a lot of swill before you find someone who is conscientious enough, honest enough and cares about you enough to not short change you… in some way [5:34:30].

Audience: [inaudible]


Audience: [inaudible]

TM: Telepathine yes. Ahh Ayahuasca was discovered by Richard Spruce… in 1853 and then in the early years of the 20th century the germanest [inaudible] brought a lot of it back to Berlin and Louis Lewin characterized an alkaloid which they named telepathine but it was not realised then until [5:35:00], I think, 1957 by the chemist [inaudible] that ahh well [inaudible] oo-or that telepathine was exactly the same compound as an early compound isolated [inaudible] named [inaudible] and since the rules of chemical nomenclature are that the first compound, the first name takes precedent, telepathine had to be dropped and [inaudible] substituted but it tells you how convinced these early [5:35:30] ethnographers were that this stuff was ahh, you know, exciting, paranormal, mental abilities.

Audience: [inaudible question]

TM: The [inaudible]?

Audience: Yes.

TM: Oh, well. No, no. See what happened was the what what [inaudible] took back to Berlin was the liana, the vine - Banisteriopsis caapi - ahh the the other active [5:36:00] ingredient in Ayahuasca was not

Transcribed by Francisco Arez

[5:36:00]

TM: The other active ingredient in ayahuasca was not isolated chemically until 1956.

Audience: But the guys who took the vine back [inaudible] the vine?

TM: The vine doesn’t contain DMT.

Audience: But the harmaline itself?


TM: Well yes, has an effect, at high doses it can cause hallucination by itself.. The uh, the plant which contains the DMT, normally , there are a couple of possible substitute, [5:36:30] but normally what’s used in the Amazon is Cicotria Veridis. Uh, this is a little coffee-like plant that contains DMT in the roots. One of the great mysteries of ayahuasca is how, out of 475,000 species of plant in the Amazon these people figured out that you pound the vine and combine it with the leaves and then go through this elaborate boiling and concentrating [5:37:00] and then you get this fantastic visionary beverage. If you ask them how they figured it out, they say the plants told us. Which is so far, the best answer anybody has come up with. In 1962, Melvin Bristoll, who was a graduate student of Richard Evan Shultsies at Harvard was studying ayahuasca among the Sibundoi Indians [5:37:30] and


the Sibundoi Indians [5:37:30] and uh, he took ayahuasca. And during the trip a plant was revealed to him. And he was told that it would be alkaloid positive. And it was alkaloid positive. Well, this is now anecdotally embedded in the literature. Was it dumb luck? Was it synchronicity? Or was it that plants tell you about other plants? The way ayahuasca is used by research pharmacologists [5:38:00] in these Amazon tribes is they brew a standard brew. And then if they have a plant, that they, for some reason suspect might have some medical usage, they will put a little bit of that plant into the ayahuasca, And then the ayahuasca will give them a readout on it and explain what it is. I had one of the longest evenings I have ever put in where I took half a dose of ayahuasca [5:38:30] and half a dose of mushrooms. And it was absolutely god awful. It was different from


it was absolutely god awful. It was different from any bad trip I’d ever had. It didn’t seem to be about my personality it seemed to be about core processes. There was a little pacman thing and I could see it moving through my memory. Just chew, chew, chew, chew, chew. And I didn’t know, you know that horrifying scene in 2001 where the guy is outside [5:39:00] the spaceship and he say “Open the pod doors Hal. Open the pod doors Hal.” Well that’s how I felt. I felt, I could almost see the molecular machinery had jammed. And I said, “Oh my God, It’s not going to deanimate. Or de-alkalate. It’s somehow caught in some kind of a loop. And I sweated bullets for an hour and a half with it. It was really horrible. [5:39:30] And then it finally released. And let me go. But as I sat in that chair I said, you know if I can’t pull out


I said, you know if I can’t pull out of this place, there’s a room in a back ward somewhere and they will just sit me there and look in on me every 12 or 14 hours, and that’ll be my story.


Audience: You said earlier that you were surprised that you had no kind [garbled audio] We have a clinical climate that’s not congenial to exploring.

[5:40:00]

TM: Because I don’t feel particularly courageous. I don’t feel that this is unusual what we’re doing here. Am I crazy? Could be. Uh, it seems to me, would seem to me, knowing what I know, which is no more than a thousand other people know, I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t talk about these things. Because [5:40:30] our problem is we’re disempowered, unhappy, and disconnected from ourselves and each other. Here’s the solution. How can you, it’s a political obligation, or it’s a moral obligation to try and at least inform people. They don’t have to take it. But they should at least have the facts of the matter in front of them as they live their lives. So , I, I just do it because I couldn’t do it any other way. And I’m puzzled that nobody else feels [5:41:00] ah, this imperative. Because the people I talk too, you know a thousand people have told me psychedelics were the most important thing that ever happened to them. But not one of those thousand people ever said, “And I scheduled a speaking tour to do the same thing your doing.” So I don’t know..

Audience; [garbled audio] fear and paranoia I hear there were even people were afraid to come to this and revealing their interest?

[5:41:30]


[5:41:30]

TM: Wow! Well either I’m crazy or they are. I don’t know. See, I think that , ah that, ah you know how, um, if you confront certain, um, well butterflies, or deer. There are certain kinds of animals that if you move slowly enough, they can’t tell you’re there. Because they’re set up for edge detection. And if you move slowly enough, they don’t register the edge transiting.

[5:42:00]

Transcribed by Micki Garrison

TM: [5:42:00]... so you can actually walk right up to them and grab them, if you know how to do it. Lizards are like this, cats, so, so i think that by moving with stealth, rather than going to Harvard or Berkeley and inviting the freshmen class to pour into the street and smash bank windows, that we can actually flip this thing along. I think that eventually such desperation it's going to strike straight institutions [5:42:30] that they will come to us and ask. They're gonna try everything when the going gets rough and when they finally decide to drop all their pretensions we'll be perfectly willing to have a dialogue. I'm sorry to hear that people felt that paranoid about it. I don't think the political climate is that repressive. I think people are doing the work of the man for the man by being that paranoid.

Audience: [inaudible] [5:43:00]...counter-pressures.


TM: Well counter-pressures, this book was banned in Florida but for crying out loud look at the Russians, they were able to toss out the Communist Party, well now that's a pretty scary thing to go up against. We don't have anything comparable to that (ahh) in terms of it's depth of penetration into our lives and yet they were able to do that. I think, you know, there's more to life

than hiding out. [5:43:30] (Ahh) you gotta make the grand gesture at a certain point and then let the chips fall where they may.

Audience: You're right.

TM: Brave words, ohh boy... [audience laughs] (ahh).

Audience: [inaudible]...something for your audiences (ahh) an organization or something that taken... [inaudible] ...raising consciousness and changing our society?

TM: Basically i think people should see this kind of meetings as a tremendous opportunity to form local [5:44:00] alliances. The last thing on earth we want here is a Terence Mckenna cult, that would just be the stupidest resolution of the whole thing. The whole message is, you don't need me or Tim or anybody else, just, you know, take a little metaphysical responsibility upon yourself, realise you are the microcosm of the microcosm and then (ahh) get with like minded people and proceed. [5:44:30] I mean, this is how political revolutions are made, is by people just ignoring as the irrelevant outmoded social forms and structures and insisting on their own authenticity.

Audience: [inaudible]...Hofmann foundation...[inaudible]...help?

TM: Oh, it might help... people... i mean, how would it help?


TM: Oh, it might help... people... i mean, how would it help?

Audience: [inaudible]...strength in numbers.

TM: Strength in numbers, well i think people [5:45:00] should support psychedelic communities, archival projects (ahh), legalization moves (ahh), yes but mainly i think what we all need to do is get more loaded. [audience laughs] You know, deeper trips, higher doses, see, it's not that we want to convert the entire planet to taking mushrooms. It's that we just want to be left alone to do


what we want to do. The mushroom [5:45:30] if it's as great as i say it is then it doesn't need a mob clearing the way for it, it's perfectly able to advance its own agenda. The thing is just not to yield to fear. Cause if, as i said, if you yield to fear you do the man's work for the man and that makes you the man! So, you have to do is just say, oh, you know, this is what we do and (ahh), eventually it will change. I mean, gay people [5:46:00] is a good example, i mean, in our own life times we've seen this go from, you know, unspeakable crime against nature which decent people took care to not even being formed of [audience laughs] to, you know, a political sub-culture with it's own agenda and it's own cress and it's own political clouds. Well, we are not as under the thumb as gay people were, say, in the early 50s


as gay people were, say, in the early 50s [5:46:30] or something. If they can do it, we can do it. If black people can go from slavery to a legitimate claim on full social integration into the body politic than we can do it too. But not if we, no, in America nobody gets nothing unless they demand it. So as long as we bow our heads and hide our stash and they're looking over our shoulder, well then they got us on the run. But we just have to say, look, [5:47:00] this is it, this is who i am! If this doesn't gibe with your political agenda, adjust your political agenda [audience laughs] because this is who we are. Well now let's knock off and regroup for tomorrow on that point, but thank's very much. [silence] Well, (ahh), before we get into (ahh) this morning's (ahh) rigid agenda, (ahh) (ahh) where were we [5:47:30] yesterday? And our,


were we [5:47:30] yesterday? And our, [audience laughs] (ahh), is there, i recall there were hands up. To the people who belong to those hands still have the concerns but went with them?


Audience: [inaudible]...local alliances and (ahh), psychedelic communities...[inaudible]

TM: Talk about forming local alliances and psychedelic communities... Well i think, you know, as i said this is your affinity group. You can't recognize psychedelic people walking around on the street [5:48:00]

Transcribed by Tiago Ramos

[5:48:00] On the street because our victory in the area of fashion has been so total that now even priests look like freaks. [*laughs*] So uhh, yeah i’ve been in a number of places where people organized uhh i don’t know what you would discuss them, discussion groups, affinity groups, in the wake of it, it’s something you have to self-organize, uhh, maybe in the period after the [5:48:30] close this afternoon, the people who are into that should exchange names and get something going, i mean obviously it’s a delicate thing but on the other hand uhh..Mmmhmm?

[inaudible question from audience]

™: For me?

[inaudible audience]


™: Well a lot of [5:49:00] people feel more secure uhh doing journeys if they have uhh some kind of ground control and in the most casual form that can just be your best friend who doesn’t do it but you do. Or if you suspect that fairly deep and uhm charged issues are going to rise-arise out of it, why you want it to be someone with some psychotherapeutic experience. But on the other hand you know, you’re in a such a vulnerable state in that dimension that you really want to choose the facilitator carefully, I mean, and have some kind of set of agreements worked out before. I mean, the psychedelic trip doesn’t always take the direction you want it to. I mean, you want- you write down before you take it that you want to deal with some episode of childhood trauma [5:50:00] or abandonment then you get loaded and it seems so preposterous that you, you know, you can hardly contemplate the notion without laughing


you can hardly contemplate the notion without laughing out loud and the facilitator has this - keeps trying to bring you back, say, ‘well you’re doing the work! We’re here to do the work!’, well, then you say, well, you know, having a knock-down drag-out fight while is somebody is loaded isn’t exactly the way to go either. You sorta have to feel [5:50:30] into that issue as i said yesterday, i, i can’t get where i want to go in the presence of somebody else because they hold me to the surface. If i were to have my idea of the perfect facilitator, situation is that they are two rooms away and you have something equivalent of a beeper and then you know you can beep them and they’ll come in and pat you on the head and tell you it’s alright if you need that.[5:51:00] But otherwise, they stay completely out of it, it’s really nice to follow your own thoughts you know? And i think


follow your own thoughts you know? And i think we change in the presence of another person, you know? We create a persona, and uh it takes a lot of energy to maintain the persona. And in that situation there’s no reason, so why do it? Yeah?


[Question from audience] [5:51:30]

™: Well, not exactly, i mean people always say can you do it on the natch? And i sorta feel like if i could do [5:52:00] it on the natch i’d be alarmed enough to check myself in for some serious mental health care.Uhh, It's too radical, you don’t want to be able to do that [5:52:00] on the natch.

Audience: Oh come on [laughs]

™: It’s a wonderful control on it! To know that it won’t happen unless you take the stuff. You know? Because it’s not a mood shift or a subtle refocusing from foreground to background, it’s an absolutely ontology peeling breakthrough.

Audience: [inaudible question]


Audience: [inaudible question]

™: In principle, i, [5:52:30] i agree with that and i’m fascinated to try anything anybody has in mind but uhh you have to be very demanding. And I think too many people are not demanding at all, I mean, you sit people down in a room and tell them we’re gonna repeat ooma humm 500 times and at the end of it they come to you with tears of joy in their eye and tell you it was the most profound that’s ever happened to them. I don’t understand where those people [5:53:00] could be coming from you know? I mean it’s uhm, i can sit down and like think about being stoned on DMT and uh and i can and i can give myself the butterflies with that exercise but-but not much else, that’s as far as i can get, you know? Uhh persistently these various traditions claim that they can deliver the goods, but when you look at the [5:53:30] art which is the paper trail that they leave, it doesn’t look like what i’m talking about. You know I mean i went through I, once, for a while i was a professional art buyer for tibetan art, tankas and that kind of thing and i interiorized all of that iconography and uh, but it isn't’ very much like uh what we are seeing. And uh, you know there are a number of highly idiosyncratic [5:54:00] artists..

Transcribed by Jonathan Laliberte


Transcribed by Jonathan Laliberte

TM: [5:54:00] Idiosyncratic artists gathered through the history of art … g- Gustave Moreau, James Ensor, we mentioned Hieronymus Bosch. Uhm mmhm know- you know hmm … uhm Matty Carline? … but I’m trying to think of older ones. But- but not- these seem to be unique visions, but not exactly the vision that ahh seems to come out of this stuff. Part of what’s [5:54:30] so interesting to me is how alien it is. How if art is the- if the artist is supposed to be the antenna of society anticipating the visions which will later become the paradigm, then they’re not doing the job very well in the psychedelic uhm domain. Yeah .. are- you wanna- did you have a follow-up?

Audience: [inaudible question] [5:55:00]


Audience: [inaudible question] [5:55:00]

TM: Well, but this is where the action is. You know, it has to- it has to make sense in the world. Now, I don’t want to suggest, I mean, I- I think … like in the case of psilocybin I have no doubt whatsoever that if you take five grams of psilocybin [5:55:30] every four days for let’s say forty days then you will have nothing whatsoever to say to the rest of us. You know, if what you see - the thing is in the spiritual quest all these methods: yoga and mantra and then … you know, all the mmm uhm, new versions of this. The whole s- the whole stance of the spiritual questor is ahh accelerator to the floor [5:56:00] all the time. When you switch over to this method it’s the breakpads that are going to get the workout. Ahh, we don’t- we psychedelic people do not strenuously exert ourselves to attain peculiar states of mind, we strenuously exert ourselves to keep the states of mind from becoming too peculiar.

Audience: Why?

TM: Why? Because it can become mmm so [5:56:30] peculiar, that- that- that- I don’t know why!!! [laughs hysterically]

Audience: [laughs] [inaudible]

TM: Yes, that’s it. It can become so peculiar, that it is unspeakable. And if it’s unspeakable, it’s j- just dropped out of the social contract, you know.


Audience: So really, the reason to maintain it is so you can get back in the psychological state and communicate, but … what I’m thinking is that I’m sure [5:57:00] that there are people who have pursued it to the point that they just walked out of [inaudible] come back.

TM: Mmm, yes, well that’s what I wanted to say. If you want to be the guy on cold mountain who is covered with hair who the village people occasionally see when the mist clears when he descends to the lower levels to cut wood. You can become that daoist immortal. Ahh, you know w- w- what I like to say about psychedelics [5:57:30] is once you get to this it’s no longer about seeking the answer. It’s now a tough or go, now you have to face the answer. And it’s so easy to seek … you know, this Rishi, that Roshi, that Geishe, that Guru and all the wonderful people and the gossip and hijinks around the ashram and all that malarkey, but once you get to this and it’s just you and it … [5:58:00] you know, it’s a- it’s a whole different ballgame.

Audience: [inaudible question]

TM: Well, to s- to s- we’re talking there are two things. The experience and the wisdom and maturity that comes from the experience. You don’t have to keep dosing to do that. But to attain, maintain and workout the implications [5:58:30] of that, but you have to keep dosing to keep encountering the unspeakable thing that is the source of all that maturation and- and so forth. My gosh, everybody’s agitated here … Yeah?


Audience: [laughs] I wondered if ahh in your experiences in Amazon or [inaudible] if you found that they were able to uhm to do this [5:59:00] without drugs or whether they were even interested in?

TM: No, largely not. Ahh, in the Amazon- I mean I discussed this with people and they- they said: “No”, you know, “you must- the plant is the teacher.” I mentioned or maybe I didn’t, but there’s an interesting book called ‘Haoma and Harmaline’ by Flattery and Schwartz and it discusses the rel- ambiance of the religious attitudes of early Zoroastrianism and they believed [5:59:30] in what they called the menog existence. And we’re talking, you know, twen- two thousand B.C. here, and they uhm ... believed there was no possible way of accessing the spiritual dimension except drugs. That was the entire way to do it. And I think it’s a- it’s a kind of pharmacological and energy barrier. It’s good that these things are aw- isolated from ordinary [6:00:00] experience ...

Transcribed by Lovro Tacol

… isolated from ordinary [06:00:00] experience by the formality of having to take the compound; if they weren’t it would be flooding in upon us all the time and we would have a hard time indeed, yeah.

Audience: well, I used to think about people taking the psychedelic

Ten there’s this other people practice meditation. [06:00:30] I read somewhere recently that people in the amazon that take ayahuasca they their

And what I haven’t seen very much is the combination of what you know mental practices ah so as to ah plus taking pscylocibin

[06:01:00]


[06:01:00]

THIS CONCLUDES TAPE 4. OUR PROGRAM CONTINUES WITH TAPE 5

Terence: why is there no talk of the combining of the techniques with psychedelica?

Audience:

Terence: well, I don’t know exactly, I mean I would certainly agree. [06:01:30] See I think that all religion is based on the experience of ecstasy.

And a religion-

Audience:


Terence: And a religion like Hinduism represents to my mind an extreme case. The roots of hinduism are in the soma rite. For 3000 years this is what hindu religiosity was about; it was an intoxicant, eh and ah without the intoxicant there was no [06:02:00] connection to the mystery. Well, then for some reason it became tremendously hierarchically structured and and constipated and ah dogmatic, and ehm ahh… well certainly dominator inla-i- if not altright fascism. And so I think all these religions have their roots in this irrational experience [06:02:30] but they constantly want to turn it into a real state operation [audience laughs], and they do, and they do, and so- but in answer to your question: all these techniques work with psychedelics, you know mantra, yantra, magical invocation, ahh, raising the kundaliny… all of these things which seem so totally obscure [06:03:00] if- from this


obscure [06:03:00] if- from this level of consciousness it just becomes an: “of course, of course it works” so it seems to me the lost ingredient is the psychedelic. I mean ehh y-you know, if you go to India and you have any illusions about Sadhus, I mean Sadhus they’re hash-heads, with a line of patter, that’s all. I mean the main concern in any community of Sadhus is: how many [06:03:30]JOINTS can you make and smoke before you fall asleep. And m- I’ve never seen a yoga text that came clean about this and said, you know, this is basically a how to use cannabis technique, so eh yo- it’s good to go to the actual place and see, see how it’s being handled. What’s going on in the Amazon is the shamans cure, they chant, the provide and exemplar for [06:04:00] their society but when you get seriously loaded with them and talk to them their attitude is


loaded with them and talk to them their attitude is more like scientists. They will agree that they can cure and find lost objects and predict the weather and all that but they don’t understand how this works. They’re very eager to admit that it’s all a big mystery and that beyond the cheerful set of shamanic techniques, that they, the Witoto, the Guarani, whoever they are, beyond the cheerful [06:04:30] ahh power of the conjuration of these techniques lies the absolute unknown and they’re aware of that. There’s no closure in shamanism so it sort of keeps you humble, yeah.


Audience:

[06:05:00]

Terence: right

Audience:

Terence: right

Audience: of a contact high, [06:05:30] when you are around people

Terence: oh I think contact highs are very real, ehm, not only contact highs but there are also contact lows eh, [audience laughs] which are very noticeable, y-you know there’s a - there’s a phenomenon called allophrenia, do you know what allophrenia is?

Audience: No

Terence: Allophrenia is when your friend is put in the hospital [06:06:00] for schizophrenia and you go to visit him and you become- you begin acting so peculiar that they don’t let you out [audience laughs]

Transcribed by Lucas Mathias


Transcribed by Lucas Mathias

Alophrenia is when your friend is put in the hospital for schizophrenia, and you go to visit him and you become – you begin acting so peculiar that they don’t let you out. This is a common phenomenon: misbehavior by people who have come to visit people who have been hospitalized for schizophrenia or psychosis. The best theory is that it’s pheremonal. You know, there’s one theory of what schizophrenia is, that schizophrenia is a pheremonal disorder. And, you, what happens is your pheromone system goes haywire. So then, you don’t smell right. So then the people around you begin frowning at you, avoiding you, turning their back on you when you approach, then you begin thinking, there’s something wrong with me. I’m weird. Then you secrete more of this weird pheromone and people get - and a dissonance begins to happen until finally you have to be plucked out of the situation. There are psychiatrists who swear that they can diagnose schizophrenia by sniff test. You know they just walk over and take a hit off the side of your neck and say, you know, “Lock this one up” or (laughter) Yeah.

Q: (unintelligible)


Q: (unintelligible)

T: Now, the problem is one of – the question is, is there in Huichol art a trace of this psychedelic dimension. I guess there’s a trace, the problem is – is twofold, the problem is one of material, with wood and beads and pitch it’s very hard to get the – the – to contort that into the object seen, and then the other thing is conceptually. It’s very hard to grab and hold these very weird images. The other thing that’s happening in most traditional societies is that you operate within a canon. You know, if you’re a Huichol, you have a very limited uh, vocabulary of expression, within the iconography of Huichol art. If you’re a Tibetan Tanka painter, similarly, it’s all laid out for you. Walls of tradition are very high, the channel is very narrow. That’s why it’s so interesting when an artist can transcend the, the momentum of their cultural tradition and really produce something unique. I don’t see, I mean I think the reason I like talking to artists is because all the art of the past 20,000 years is like a tea cup dipped into the ocean. And yet any one of us, not particularly self-defined as artist, can access the ocean. Can swim in the ocean. And so you say, you know, we all can touch the same source that these great artists must have touched. Their skill was they were able to bring out a thimble-full of this material and the rest of us can only look at it and wonder and let it pass us by. Yeah.

Q: (in reference to an “extraterrestrial position” on psychedelic use and whether or not Terence still holds this position)


T: No I’m not sure, exactly, I mean the funny thing about the extraterrestrial position is that, it depends on how long it’s been since you’ve taken mushrooms, how creditable it seems. If it’s recent it seems the only possible explanation. If you wait a few months, then skepticism and reason begins to level the landscape, and you say, “No, it couldn’t possibly, really, be that.” But I think, uh . . . you know, no, I think we hardly have an inkling as to the real nature of the world, and the real history of life on this planet, and you know, we don’t know, uh, how narrowly channeled the manifestation of organic intelligence is. Does it always have to be in a body? Does it always have to be in a body that stands upright with binocular vision? I think the real task with dealing with extraterrestrials is to know when you’ve got one. It’s completely silly to search the galaxy with radio telescopes for, uh, a radio civilization. I mean to my mind that is as chuckleheaded as deciding you’re going to search the galaxy for a decent Italian restaurant. (laughter) I mean, it doesn’t work like that!

So, um, you know, if you think about the mushroom, try to think about it objectively. It looks to me very much like a good candidate for an extraterrestrial. First of all, DNA has been known to us only since 1950, less than a century and we’re already involved in this thing called the Human Genome Project. Well, the real – what that means is that we are taking control of the scripts that write human beings. It seems to me anything we would recognize as [6:12:00]

Transcribed by Kristen Askin


Transcribed by Kristen Askin

[6:12:00] intelligence would pass through a phase of self-analysis where (6:12:04) it would realize it was made out of DNA and it would then sequence itself. We’re about to do this ourselves. Well, that means that most extraterrestrials will be the product of their own reflexive design process. In other words, an extraterrestrial that has crossed the gulf across the stars must surely then be able to control its own form.

Well, then, if you look at the mushroom, it’s a curious combination of artifact and entity. It looks sort of manufactured. There’s very little fact on that system - I mean, first of all, um, fungi are primary decomposers. This means that they are at the very bottom of the food chain. This makes the kind of vegetarianism espoused by Buddhists look like an orgy of slaughter. You know? Because if you’re at the very bottom of the food chain, that is the only place that is absolutely karma-free. So there’s the mushroom, occupying the karma-free position at the bottom of the food chain. Well, then, it’s – you know, we’ve been reading about the huge mycelial clones spread out under the soil in Michigan and Wyoming, well those things, what that is, is that’s a cobweb-like network. And in the case of a psilocybin-like species, filled with neurotransmitter compounds. Can you imagine how many synaptic plants there must be on a 1,500 acre mushroom clone? If brain size is any relation to intelligence, then hang on, Hannah. (laughter) Because, uh, that means that this thing which has spread through the forests of the Midwest has a, uh, brain approximate in weight to, uh . . . a couple of dozen gray whales.


Uh, the other thing is, then, the spore, looks perfectly designed to sustain itself in outer space. If you want to store spores for longevity you create conditions as close to the conditions in outer space as you can. High vacuum. Very low temperature. Uh, the casing of a spore is one of the most electron dense organic materials in nature. So electron dense that it approximates a metal. Well, global currents can form on the quasi metallic surface of an airborne spore and they act as a further repellant for radiation. So, and, you know, percolating through the galaxy at an ordinary rate typical of stellar material, a mushroom species could percolate from one side of the galaxy to another in under four hundred thousand years. Well, that’s lightning speed compared to the size and age of the universe. If we were to gain the power to design ourselves, I think after a whole bunch of uh, of Madonna and Robert Redford clones, we would probably move on to becoming something very much like a mushroom. (laughter) It’s uh, you know, mild (6:15:43), its noninvasive, it’s at the bottom of the food chain, it’s virtually immortal, its laden with neurotransmitters, and it’s living in the imagination.

And this brings me back to a favorite subject of mine, this is where we have to go, we have to enter into the Blakian, divine imagination. That’s where our future lies. Uh, at this point, our relationship to this planet, as an infant-child relationship of impending toxemia, we have to be parted from the mother - to save the mother and to save us.


And there are not that many possibilities. Where are we going to go? The political geniuses who run this planet have made travel to the stars virtually impossible. I mean, don’t kid yourselves, it isn’t only a matter of announcing a program. Our short, stubby fingers couldn’t assemble something like a Saturn-5 moon rocket. That was made by a generation of people now deceased. Americans in this, uh, era, are a rather dull-witted people who have trouble even running a third world economy. So we’re not going to the stars. You can forget that. Uh, so then where are we going? Well, nanotech. Is that a possibility? Could we download everybody into a super-cool cube of gold and terbium alloy buried three hundred feet deep in the center of Copernicus? And then we’ll leave Earth and go there and dance forever in the hallways of the astral imagination?

That’s one possibility. Another possibility is, is there a way to diffuse consciousness into the environment? Can we becomes dolphins, caterpillars, gray whales, and mosquitos and just sort of defocus ourselves? I mean, all of these, of course, are wildly radical notions. On the other hand, we’re headed straight toward a brick wall at about 5,000 miles an hour. We have to figure out something pretty astonishing in a hurry. [06:18:03]

Transcribed by Kristen Askin

TM:...[6:18:00] figure out something pretty uh, astonishing in a hurry. Yeah.

Audience: Yes uh, another thing about the function of the mushroom is ??? for reentry into the atmosphere ??

[™ laughs]

TM: The heat shield! Yes, precisely. [Chuckles]

Audience: ?? can jumpstart an evolution


Audience: ?? can jumpstart an evolution

TM: That’s a funny question I don't know because it's so hard to tease apart genetics and environment. I mean they certainly have had a jump start on evolution picture of hanging out in the space that our lives have created. Uh, you know I think children need lots of attention lots of nurturing physical and spiritual. Uh, I guess I would say so, and certainly they haven't been programmed with the fear and misunderstanding that that is in the society. We just got through anti-dope week at our school which is an incredibly painful experience at this particular school because I don't think there's a person associated with it who believes it for a moment uh, but it's like we all have to study fascism because we live in a fascist state. Uh, a teacher made a statement that uh, that LSD caused brain damage and my son dared to challenge this. And the guy said well, who told you it doesn’t cause brain damage?

Audience: Daddy!

TM: No, not my Daddy. He said, well Albert Hoffman told me it doesn’t cause brain damage! [Audience laughter, TM laughs] End of discussion!

Audience: ??

TM: Mm mm. Yeah

Audience: I know that children are very interconnected with their parents, so when you’re doing substances do you feel like the presence of your child sometimes going on your psychotropic experiences ???


TM: Yeah well when children are very young you know all kinds of psychic phenomenon happen and you know I think mothers nursing mothers and their relationship to their two children as intensely telepathic. I remember when my daughter was not very old, she must have been like about three and a half and I had the dream and it was very unusual dream for me and very highly realized and I dreamed of an orrery. Do you know what an orrery is? It’s a model of the solar system made of gears and you crank it and there’s the sun in the center and the planets go around it, but this was a huge orrery. I dreamed I walk down the hall and I opened the door and I walked into this room and there was this orrery and these planets were circling around the sun inside this room and then, and I was awakened by my daughter crying and I went downstairs and she said uh, there were planets circling around inside my bedroom. So- and you know that's a very specific and rare image for an adult or a child to have. So yes, I think that we’re- our chuckle-headedness is the main barrier to encountering all kinds of special abilities that around us all the time. We are truly the prisoners of our limited conceptions. Yeah.


Audience: ?? go back to some of the questions about why you don't want to take it every day for 40 days in a row. And it’s more the psychological level that what causes- I’ve worked with ?? therapies in Mexico ??? stories about Jung and uh, many of the people who have gotten into the situation of psychosis are people who have used drugs as a general principle behind that is that people have experienced something that they cannot integrate back into their psyche or whatever even if it’s the ability to say well, that was then and this is now. And therefore you get psychosis. So not to, not to say these things to alarm people but ??? that this ability to come back and not be far out there and that there are a lot of different set up parameters to this ?? on your ego strength. Another one is the society you live in. If you're a shaman and you can say these things ?? Then you're fine. Um, and it doesn't have to be drugs. Um, Jung used to when he was older he used to sit in a chair and go inside and when he came back he would have this litany of things that he would say so that he could come back and function. He would say you know I'm Carl Gustav Jung, my wife is___ my children of this many children this many grandchildren.

TM: Uh huh, the reconnect affirmation. Yeah, well I think that's not a bad idea.

Audience: I wanted to ask you how you see ???


Audience: I wanted to ask you how you see ???

TM: Well I don't have a very popular position on ritual and I blame it on the mushroom because I just quote the mushroom. And the mush - I said what about ritual? And it said that's fine if you don't know what you're doing. And I think that, that you know, it's really not an anti-ritualist position because that is what ritual is. That's what you do if you don't know what you're doing.

Audience: ??

TM: None of us. But, you know, the purpose - can tell when the ritual works because it makes itself obsolete. That's the- it's- yeah.

Audience: ?? I think as we continue...??

™: Well [6:24:00]

Transcribed by Eva Petakovic

TM: [6:24:00] Well I don't have a very popular position on ritual and I blame it on the mushroom because I just quote the mushroom. And the mush - and I said what about ritual? And it said that's fine if you don't know what you're doing. And I think that, that, you know, it's really not an anti-ritualist position because that is what ritual is. That's what you do if you don't know what you're doing.

Audience: ??

TM: None of us. uh but you know the purpose - can tell when the ritual works because it makes itself obsolete. That's the- it's- yeah.

Audience: ?? I think, I think as we continue...??


Audience: ?? I think, I think as we continue...??

TM: Well, you know even in the most ritualistic context there's always a footnote made for the crazy wisdom. I mean every great teacher has said that what he saying is malarkey. A teacher that doesn't tell you that what he or she is saying is malarkey is not to be taken seriously. So you know it's the if you meet the Buddha on the road kill him style of thinking. Or I was just reading this Guru who's coming on strong. Uh, is it- is his name Pucha Ji?

Audience: Dass?

TM: No, no not Dass. [Terence chuckles]. But anyway somebody- this guy said don't, don't do practice. Don't do practice. Practice is only distraction. He said we have to keep thinking up- you know running an ashram is not easy. These students they expect so much of us. To keep continually inventing stuff to keep them happy and send them off on these crazy quests and, and you know, endless fasts and all this stuff because they want that. But you know the guru is pretty much content to kick back with the latest Rolling Stone. Yeah?

Audience: If my memory serves me correctly I think I saw it on the handouts that you're doing some Sheldrake.

TM: Right.

Audience: Could you comment on that? I'd like to know a little bit about that.


Audience: Could you comment on that? I'd like to know a little bit about that.

TM: Well, are you all familiar with Rupert Sheldrake's work? Sheldrake is a British biologist whose written a number of books. First book is called A new science of life and it was catapulted to fame by virtue of a review in Nature which said it should be burned. And hen he wrote a book called The Presence of the Past. Sheldrake as an extraordinary simple interesting revolutionary idea that just drives scientist straight up a tree. His idea is that um, once something happens it's easier for it to happen the next time.

Audience: ??


Audience: ??

TM: Yes, simple, but it takes then forms which drive people crazy because he asserts based on that that if you teach rats to run a new kind of maze in Australia then rats in Massachusetts should be able to run this maze uh, faster than if the rats and Australia hadn't uh, learned it because once something has been, has occurred then it has a momentum in time. He calls this the theory of formative causation or morphogenesis and it explains a lot of things which are otherwise very difficult for biology to explain but it raises also a bunch of issues that are pretty tricky. And so Rupert and I have been close friends for years and even longer I've been tight with a mathematician in Santa Cruz named Ralph Abraham who's a chaos dynamicist and Ralph and Rupert and I did a book together called Trialogues at the Edge of the West which will be out at the end of the summer from Bayer and we'll all get together at Esalen at the end of August and do a bunch more of these public three-way dialogues which are pretty spirited because we are very different people from each other. Uh, but all psychedelic in all interested in paradigm recasting. So that's what it's about and it'll be out in mid-summer. End of August for that Esalen thing. Anybody else. Yeah.

Audience: ??

TM: Uh huh.

Audience: ??

TM: Well, feminism is a necessary thing for a successful future because the archaic world was so dominated by, well that's a bad choice of words isn't it, was so characterized by an awareness of of the feminine and the boundary dissolving and the organic and the whole problem with the world uh, is that we cannot feel the consequences of what we are doing. You know, I mean recently we had paraded-[6:30:00]

Transcribed by Eva Petakovic

[6:30:00]


Transcribed by Eva Petakovic

[6:30:00]

TM: You know i mean recently we had paraded in front of the figure of Jeffrey Dahmer as who you don't want to be like. And yet jeffery dahmer to me was an absolute paradigm of global civilization because his problem was that he didn't he couldn't feel the consequences of his actions. And this is what we are doing. I mean we are lacerating ourselves by coming down the rainforests and poisoning the ocean.

[6:30:30] This is not some airy fairy save the redwoods kind of mentalities that protests.. This is our own atmosphere our own environment that were destroying. Its a its a slow suicide not so slow at the rate were tearing in half. Well somehow we have to reactivate the maternal nurturing caring circuitry that tests the tendencies

[6:31:00] that have evolved in this fabled direction uh at at bay for a long long time and you know you can call it ego you can call it male dominance you can call it a phonetic alphabet whatever it is it has to be stopped because the planet is in peril by it and i my analysis of it is that the only way to do it is to dissolve the boundary that culture and language and tradition have allowed us to create

[6:31:30] and they are largely boundaries that deress women not because men hate women but because men hate the feminine and they want to control and hold us back threatening its devouring i mean the fact that the french refer to orgasm as the little death tells you you know how what a weird kind of ambivalence haunts uh our relationship to anything which dissolves uh


[6:32:00] out of out of the knot that we have tied ourselves into and so i you know i'm a kind of non feminist feminist. I mean i think most feminists are feminists because they think women have gotten a raw deal. I m a feminist because i think mankind is headed for suicide if we don't return to a more intense expression of the feminine so it's not a political agenda for me to

[6:32:30] liberate and oppress groups of people its a collectiveness that gender necessary to save everybody and everything on the planet. Yeah

Audience:… in the end the general.. Is that um there is this … and

[6:33:00]

Malevolent entities

There's malevolent forces out there just as

[6:33:30]

TM: ..well

Of course

TM: No i mean there are malevolent and benevolent forces in there and out there. Uh but the i dont see… i don't see the world really as a struggle between good and evil and some kind of manichean situation. It seems to me that it we confer value

[6:34:00] that nature is neither good nor evil and that must then improve as ally… its just that we confer judgement this is because when you begin to get down towards the bottom line we don't know what the bottom line is. For instance were headed towards a great historical bifurcation where we're gonna have to make some really hard choices and most of the time in the so called new age they try to fuzz


[6:34:30] all the distinctions and make you think you're never going to be slammed to the wll and have to make a choice but the choice that's coming up for us is fundamental. It is are we to become the care givers the nurturers and the gardeners of the earth or is the earth you know this is i put it this way to somebody the other night the question was is the earth our mother

[6:35:00] therefore to be cared for into her old age nurtured revered and loved? Or is the earth our placenta. Therefore to be examined for signs of toxin and then buried under theapple tree. In other words what is the true nature of human beings. Are we to be integrated into nature to celebrate it or is nature a demonic and titanic force that is imprisoning spirits and

[6:35:30] holding it back from its full unfolding in worlds of alien life and higher dimension so far from here that its a miracle that … rumour reached us of the possibility of salvation. This is a tough choice because one path leads to uh radical renunciation of technology radical tearing of population. Uh and an attempt to come to terms with

[6:36:00] this small liquid planet on which we find ourselves and the other direction uh s.. Forget it. Its the husk of a seed and it is utterly meaningless in the cosmic drama and the real destiny lies out there half way … … or some other exoitc port of call i don't see how you can have that both ways.

Audience:

[6:36:30]


Audience:

[6:36:30]

TM: yes and most stars uh have lives shorter than the amount of time that biology has been on this planet. We are fortunate enough to be around a very slow burning stable star. There are a lot of.. I havent forgtotten your second question right. There are a lot of mysteries in our coscmic neighbourhood that we rarely hear addressed for example just as an example um if our destiny lies out

[6:37:00] in the great universe its a hell of technological barrier to cross to the stars. I mean it may be insurmountable however isn't it interesting that the most earth like star within seventy light years is the nearest star. Not technically the nearest star which is uh glowing red clinker called alpha centurai right, but

[6:37:30] beta centura. is 1.1 solar masses. 1.1 solar masses. No star within seventy light years is as earth like i mean .. sunl like as that star from the point of view of the galaxy uh beta centura and our sun almost look like lightly bonded binaries. This is an accident it is a tremendously fortuitous

[6:38:00] accident for us because it could well mean that there is a uh an earth like planet at an incredibly short distance away from us in terms of the cosmic neighbourhood in fact probably within the next years … will be created but if there is a water heavy oxygen rich world out there its going to show up .well then that is going to become a tremendous


[6:38:30] attractor in the historical matrix because it will be hailed as the answer. I mean can ou imagine? If an .. because there wil then be two possibilities. That there is intelligence next door not likely or that there is.. How do you assess it how many oxygen rih planets have we examined for crying out loud> and the other possibility is that its empty real estate.

[6:39:00] In tiether case it will excite keen interest throughout society so now thats a little odd … cosmic neighbourhood that is rarely mentioned or… yeah

Audience:.

[6:39:30]

TM: Yes I although I leave that to the .. of the world to work out the details. There is after all a possible … that is pretty clear in spite of the ravings and rantings of these christer…. The fossil record is pretty clear that we emerged out of uh the protohomoinids who emerged out of the ppasdf radiation that emerged

[6:40:00] out of and so forth and so on. I dont uh i think that uh but there may be mysteries i mean one question that im surprised nobody ever seems to ask in these weekends when i tell the cheerful story of the descent from the trees the… encounter with the mushrooms and so forth and so on is nobody ever asks well that who put the mushrooms in the path

[6:40:30]of these binoclura bipedal evolving primates i mean is this just a story of nature's happiest accidents? Or did someone say you know te weht planet start hte retraction of the rainforests seize the spores into the grasslands and watch what happens. Uh because then we come down out of the trees brainless as the wombat and began testing food sources and


[6:41:00] lo and behold here are these things which are obviously designed to be seen. I mean mushrooms are form of display theyre designed to be seen they demand to be eaten. And uh the consequences that that you know to lead a species to the brink of darer… well thats just a coincidence or is there a mind behind all of this> see i think that if mind

[6:41:30]the problem i have with all the extra terrestrial and all the channelling adn all the abducting and all the stuff that goes on is its all too B movie its all too simple. Too straightforward. That's what the troubles me about ths… scenario is that its perfectly understandable to us if its understandable you can betcha booties its the wrong answer i mean its gonna be weirder

[6:42:00]than that not about mineral extraction or even diplomatic goodwill. Uh i have a professor years ago his cosmology went like this you know how there are bacteria which you can introduce into gold slurry in low grade ore and the bacteria will concentrate the gold and then you just watch the gold out of ght bacteria and .uh mining technique

[6:42:30]that's very efficient for poor yielding gold ore. So this guys idea was that some day UFOs would appear over every major city on earth and they would just load up all the plutonim and fissionable material and take it away and say thank you very much uh this mining operation is now completed you people cn go back to hurling shit at each other in the tree tops as far as were concerned

[6:43:00]we have real application for this fissionable material you people were gonna use it blow each other up what a bunch of dummies and farewell and good luck so thats one possibility.

Audience:

Yes then I insist on getting to the plan…

Audience:


Audience:

Yes then I insist on getting to the plan…

Audience:

TM:… No, halma… and harmaline by uh no by flattery and shwaretz and

[6:43:30] its published by m the university of california press neary string studies division publication number 23.

Yeah … well what i thought we should talk about this morning as we seem to range wide and free is the practicum of all this which is you know how many of these visual plants are they there

[6:44:00]and where are they and how do you obtain them and how do you use them once you obtain them. So i thought how many of you have ever seen i… get with it. This is a uh poster which i dont even know if its still available it may be uh a print. It is still available. And its a very good ethnobotanical course in hallucinogens in one sheet of paper. Uh what it divided into basically

[6:44:30] is this is the old world and this is the new. Immediately you know this t… in the new world than the old. This is one of the great of evolution… because nobody can offer a reasonable explanation as to why there should be nearly 3 times as many hallucinogenic plants int he new world as in the old i mean other than thats where the

[6:45:00] flying saucers planted them nobody has come up with a good explanation. Nature hallucinogenic plants complexes that i have experience with and can address are uh uh well lets do a little quick geographical tour. First of all north america for reasons not well understood is quite poor in

[6:45:30] native hallucinogens. Uh there are no major north american hallucinogens. Peyote is um well yes its north american the funny thing about peyote i mean you can feed me questions…


Peyote is you know we have this tremendous respect for it we imagine that its tremendously ancient and it apparently isnt. Uh

[6:46:00]there is no archaeological evidence of peyote uyse in the aerly earth and 500 years ago. Its almost a phenomenon of the conquest. What you find in the old graves in the peyote cultural area is our the seeds of the forest… which is an ordeal poison. Strychnine and often um often drug uh human

[6:46:30]plant symbiotic relationships evolve over time. It may be that the use of hallucinogens is still in fairly dynamic evolution all over the planet uh peyote is a major hallucionce should have been used for the past 50000 years if it has only been used for the past 500 years thats pretty peculiar alright and yet that appears to be the evidence. Ibogaine

[6:47:00] not only a visionary hallucinogen but an aphrodisiac as well no evidence of any use before 1850. And yet in an area where the portugese had been trading for the past 500 years and writing cultural descriptions and interviewing hte people if its was there it would have been mentioned. So this is a puzzle uh you know ayahuasca use we assume is millennia old but on the other hand

[6:47:30]archeology is a real isreablke proposition in the amazon because the climate is so degraded. Degradaded so we can't really know um but aside from peyote and whatever its history north america seems to have only minor hallucinogens that have been utilized shamanically a pu\\le another puzzle of culture and attitudes is

[6:48:00]

(end of transcription)

Transcribed by Simon Shaw


[6:48:00]

(end of transcription)

Transcribed by Simon Shaw

[6:36:00] this small liquid planet on which we find ourselves and the other direction uh s.. Forget it. Its the husk of a seed and it is utterly meaningless in the cosmic drama and the real destiny lies out there half way … … or some other exoitc port of call i don't see how you can have that both ways.

Audience:

[6:36:30]

TM: yes and most stars uh have lives shorter than the amount of time that biology has been on this planet. We are fortunate enough to be around a very slow burning stable star. There are a lot of.. I havent forgtotten your second question right. There are a lot of mysteries in our coscmic neighbourhood that we rarely hear addressed for example just as an example um if our destiny lies out

[6:37:00] in the great universe its a hell of technological barrier to cross to the stars. I mean it may be insurmountable however isn't it interesting that the most earth like star within seventy light years is the nearest star. Not technically the nearest star which is uh glowing red clinker called alpha centurai right, but

[6:37:30] beta centura. is 1.1 solar masses. 1.1 solar masses. No star within seventy light years is as earth like i mean .. sunl like as that star from the point of view of the galaxy uh beta centura and our sun almost look like lightly bonded binaries. This is an accident it is a tremendously fortuitous


[6:38:00] accident for us because it could well mean that there is a uh an earth like planet at an incredibly short distance away from us in terms of the cosmic neighbourhood in fact probably within the next years … will be created but if there is a water heavy oxygen rich world out there its going to show up .well then that is going to become a tremendous

[6:38:30] attractor in the historical matrix because it will be hailed as the answer. I mean can ou imagine? If an .. because there wil then be two possibilities. That there is intelligence next door not likely or that there is.. How do you assess it how many oxygen rih planets have we examined for crying out loud> and the other possibility is that its empty real estate.

[6:39:00] In tiether case it will excite keen interest throughout society so now thats a little odd … cosmic neighbourhood that is rarely mentioned or… yeah

Audience:.

[6:39:30]

TM: Yes I although I leave that to the .. of the world to work out the details. There is after all a possible … that is pretty clear in spite of the ravings and rantings of these christer…. The fossil record is pretty clear that we emerged out of uh the protohomoinids who emerged out of the ppasdf radiation that emerged

[6:40:00] out of and so forth and so on. I dont uh i think that uh but there may be mysteries i mean one question that im surprised nobody ever seems to ask in these weekends when i tell the cheerful story of the descent from the trees the… encounter with the mushrooms and so forth and so on is nobody ever asks well that who put the mushrooms in the path


[6:40:30]of these binoclura bipedal evolving primates i mean is this just a story of nature's happiest accidents? Or did someone say you know te weht planet start hte retraction of the rainforests seize the spores into the grasslands and watch what happens. Uh because then we come down out of the trees brainless as the wombat and began testing food sources and

[6:41:00] lo and behold here are these things which are obviously designed to be seen. I mean mushrooms are form of display theyre designed to be seen they demand to be eaten. And uh the consequences that that you know to lead a species to the brink of darer… well thats just a coincidence or is there a mind behind all of this> see i think that if mind

[6:41:30]the problem i have with all the extra terrestrial and all the channelling adn all the abducting and all the stuff that goes on is its all too B movie its all too simple. Too straightforward. That's what the troubles me about ths… scenario is that its perfectly understandable to us if its understandable you can betcha booties its the wrong answer i mean its gonna be weirder

[6:42:00]

Transcribed by Simon Shaw

[6:42:00]than that not about mineral extraction or even diplomatic goodwill. Uh i have a professor years ago his cosmology went like this you know how there are bacteria which you can introduce into gold slurry in low grade ore and the bacteria will concentrate the gold and then you just watch the gold out of ght bacteria and .uh mining technique


[6:42:30]that's very efficient for poor yielding gold ore. So this guys idea was that some day UFOs would appear over every major city on earth and they would just load up all the plutonim and fissionable material and take it away and say thank you very much uh this mining operation is now completed you people cn go back to hurling shit at each other in the tree tops as far as were concerned

[6:43:00]we have real application for this fissionable material you people were gonna use it blow each other up what a bunch of dummies and farewell and good luck so thats one possibility.

Audience:

Yes then I insist on getting to the plan…

Audience:

TM:… No, halma… and harmaline by uh no by flattery and shwaretz and

[6:43:30] its published by m the university of california press neary string studies division publication number 23.

Yeah … well what i thought we should talk about this morning as we seem to range wide and free is the practicum of all this which is you know how many of these visual plants are they there

[6:44:00]and where are they and how do you obtain them and how do you use them once you obtain them. So i thought how many of you have ever seen i… get with it. This is a uh poster which i dont even know if its still available it may be uh a print. It is still available. And its a very good ethnobotanical course in hallucinogens in one sheet of paper. Uh what it divided into basically


[6:44:30] is this is the old world and this is the new. Immediately you know this t… in the new world than the old. This is one of the great of evolution… because nobody can offer a reasonable explanation as to why there should be nearly 3 times as many hallucinogenic plants int he new world as in the old i mean other than thats where the

[6:45:00] flying saucers planted them nobody has come up with a good explanation. Nature hallucinogenic plants complexes that i have experience with and can address are uh uh well lets do a little quick geographical tour. First of all north america for reasons not well understood is quite poor in

[6:45:30] native hallucinogens. Uh there are no major north american hallucinogens. Peyote is um well yes its north american the funny thing about peyote i mean you can feed me questions…

Peyote is you know we have this tremendous respect for it we imagine that its tremendously ancient and it apparently isnt. Uh

[6:46:00]there is no archaeological evidence of peyote uyse in the aerly earth and 500 years ago. Its almost a phenomenon of the conquest. What you find in the old graves in the peyote cultural area is our the seeds of the forest… which is an ordeal poison. Strychnine and often um often drug uh human

[6:46:30]plant symbiotic relationships evolve over time. It may be that the use of hallucinogens is still in fairly dynamic evolution all over the planet uh peyote is a major hallucionce should have been used for the past 50000 years if it has only been used for the past 500 years thats pretty peculiar alright and yet that appears to be the evidence. Ibogaine


[6:47:00] not only a visionary hallucinogen but an aphrodisiac as well no evidence of any use before 1850. And yet in an area where the portugese had been trading for the past 500 years and writing cultural descriptions and interviewing hte people if its was there it would have been mentioned. So this is a puzzle uh you know ayahuasca use we assume is millennia old but on the other hand

[6:47:30]archeology is a real isreablke proposition in the amazon because the climate is so degraded. Degradaded so we can't really know um but aside from peyote and whatever its history north america seems to have only minor hallucinogens that have been utilized shamanically a pu\\le another puzzle of culture and attitudes is

[6:48:00]

Transcribed by Simon Shaw


is [6:48:00] as you all know the northwest coast Indians, the Kwakiutl, Tsimshian- um, yeah Kwakiutl, Tsimshian and Tlingit have an extraordinary evolved Shamanism and where the people who develop that x-ray style of art. Well their cultural area has the densest number of psilocybin mushrooms of any place in the world. No cultural evidence of psilocybin use. No evidence that these people even knew these things were there. I mean I know this challenges the tradition of the all knowing aboriginal but you know, but this is what the data seems to imply. Now in Southern California and across portions of the Southwest there have been datura religions which are very old apparently. The so-called tolache religions. I don't recommend datura. I don't know what astronomic- astrological sign you have to be to make peace with that stuff, but I find it really peculiar and menacing. It's about magic which is about power and control and


It's about magic which is about power and control and usually uh, sexuality in some invasive and Dominator application. I've taken to Tora a number of times and it's been interesting but it feels watery and dark dangerous to me. There was a period when I lived in Nepal when I became aware that these sadhus, not content with their superior meditation techniques and their endless smoking of hashish, were also availing themselves of the seeds of datura metal which is conspecific to what we call Jimsonweed in this country, and so I thought well I should take this too and find out what it's about. Well, it was a very odd trip- it was- I sat in my room and bodenoth [?] and I would sit, say hm, nothing is happening, nothing happening. Well, you can only think that so many times, then my mind would drift into a kind of twilight state and then these wraith-like entities, I mean they were like Victorian ghosts. You know, they


they were like Victorian ghosts. You know, they were like women in shredded dam- shredded damask gowns or something, would fly into my window carrying newspaper sheets in their outstretched arms and they would let these sheets of newspaper flutter down onto my lap and I would like begin to read and I would begin, and I was so astonished by what I was reading that it would jerk me out of it and then say what's happening. Nothing's happening. Nothing's happening. And then my attention would drift and this would happen again. Then after about a half an hour of that as the stuff began to build up I began to, like I would undergo these very brief periods of unconsciousness and when I came out of them I would discover that my leg had been thrown up around behind my head and my arm shot through and I was like all knotted up. And then I would very carefully unfold myself and lay back down and I remember thinking I'm certainly glad


down and I remember thinking I'm certainly glad there's nobody else here because this is the kind of thing just designed to drive a sitter into a conniption fit of alarm. And you know about, about six times over the next hour and a half I went into these convulsive spasms, and then on another night these English people shared a suite of rooms off of mine and I had to get to the bathroom. I had to go through this one guy's room so this one night I hadn't taken datura but this fellow had taken datura and at one point I had to go to the John so I debated for a long time about how this is going to disturb his trip and maybe I should piss out the window, but no that would- didn't seem- although in India that's perfectly all right. And um, so finally I decided I would just walk through the room, so then as I was tiptoeing through the room I saw that he was actually having sex with this girl


saw that he was actually having sex with this girl that we knew from Katmandu and it had a slight emotional tinge for me because I had actually had my eye on her although I never said anything about it to anybody so uh, so then uh, the next morning I mentioned this and he said that yes it had been his impression as well but that in fact she wasn't there and so it was like you know I, I saw somebody else's hallucination and then what finally decided me that datura was too peculiar was that I had another English friend who lived a couple of houses away and one day I was in the market buying potatoes and this guy came along and we were just talking and in the course of this conversation he was telling me how he'd been taking a lot of datura and in the course of this conversation I became aware that he thought that I was visiting him in his apartment and I decided that's too fucked up, you know, to


decided that's too fucked up, you know, to not know whether you're entertaining someone in the confines of your apartment or buying vegetables in the confines of the market means that you've become too disengaged [6:54:00] from the modalities-


Transcribed by Eva Petakovic


[6:54:00] from the modalities of the real. And, of course, it creates tremendous drying, and uhm it’s a- it’s a- its- its- a uhm, deliriant, is what the literature calls it. It’s deliriant. Ahh.. but the, you know, I think that people all over the world utilize, uhm, plants for bizarre experiences. Time and time again I have run up against this [06:54:30], uhm…, one- you know there is a very rare drug in South America called oo-koo-he, oo-koo-he. It’s made by the huitoto, uhm, and the bora and the muinani in this very circumscribed area and what fascinated us about it was that it was an orally active DMT drug. And we couldn’t as pharmacologists understand how an orally active DMT drug was possible. Because the DMT should be destroyed in your [06:55:00] gut. So we wanted to get a sample of this stuff. And uhm, it’s made from


of this stuff. And uhm, it’s made from the resin of virola trees, the inner bark of the virola sheds a red resin. And uhm, we eventually in 1981, my brother and I and Wade Davis, the guy who wrote the “The Serpent and the Rainbow”, we all launched an expedition of the Rio Yaguas Yacu. [6:55:30] And where there was this stuff and we would do what we call the bioaste ...which means somebody has to test this stuff. Cause we would get samples from these shaman and we would draw straws for who got to do the bioaste. Well taking this acute was appalling. I mean your heart rate goes up to about three times normal, you shed water by the gallon, your blood pressure shoots up. [6:56:00] I mean it felt like a precoronary to me. And then we come down and say to this shaman, ya know, Lorenzio, what’s the story? And he said “Yeah, it takes


the story? And he said “Yeah, it takes getting used to doesn’t it?” [audience laughs] And uhm, so then I.. And then when you look at it, when you look at this oo-koo-he chemically you see well yes there’s dmt in there and there’s 5 mao dmt in there, but then when you do the gastronaimgram [6:56:30] you see that marching along behind those spots there are all these other spots of various tryptamine compounds, some of which are cardioregulators, some of which nobody knows what they do, and so then you realize that it’s a, it’s a dirty drug. There’s too much junk in there. What you want is something that has a very clean signature. So oo-koo-he didn’t exactly seem the way, uhm, to go. Uhm, I think this is the real [6:57:00] situation with amanita muscaria. Probably the most discussed, uninteresting, uhm, drug in the world. Because so many people have tried to hang


world. Because so many people have tried to hang so much on it. And ya know, it’s a horrible experience most of the time.


Audience: [inaudible]

TM: Yeah yeah, occasionally you’ll meet someone who says “Well you’re just wrong. It’s wonderful. [6:57:30] I’ve taken it for years; I love it. And I, ya know, don’t know. First of all it’s genetically variable, it’s geographically variable, it’s uhm, uhm, seasonally variable. And it fluctuates at various times in its uhm, in its uhm, process of maturation. So what must be going on with amanita muscaria is that you have to learn how to take it in your area, [6:58:00] from people that know when to collect it, where to collect it, how much to collect, and how to prepare it. If you just go out and find one and chow down I guarantee you it will turn you every way but loose and it will turn you loose. So uhm..

Audience: [inaudible]


Audience: [inaudible]

TM: No that’s what they always say. They say “Have you drunk your urine recently?” I got a letter last week... No, i understand. But if- Do you all understand the basis of the question? Why does urine [6:58:30] come into it? Because, uhm, in Siberia they have discovered, where this amanita thing originates, that the active principle is not destroyed inside your body. That it is excreted in the urine. And the true aficionados of this stuff believe that this so called second pass is better than the first pass. And so you have to uhm, uhm, [6:59:00] you know...they drink the urine. One of the great hazards of Siberian shamanism is stepping outside of the yurt on a snowy night to take a leak and being pitched head first into the snow by frantic reindeer who butt you out of the way to try to get to the yellow snow because they’re so completely hooked on, uhm, amanita that nothing stands in their way. [audience laughs]

Audience: [inaudible]

TM: Oh, your [inaudible] is pushing you out of the.. Well I’ve never hung out with the Yakuts. Maybe they’re a pretty wild-eyed gang. An example of how a very ancient, uhm, how a very ancient folkway can be incorporated into our culture without us even realizing it, and is provided by discussing amanita muscaria… If you go to the encyclopedia britannica and you look up Santa Claus [7:00:00]

Transcribed Paul Mullins


they’ll tell you that it has to do with Saint Nicholas and it got started in the 11th century and it’s a-, but when you look at the Santa Claus story it’s a perfect, uhm, mythologym to analyze from this point of view because look what’s going on with Santa Claus. First of all Santa Claus’ colors are red and white, the colors of the amanita muscaria for sure. [7:00:30] Santa claus lives at the north pole. What does this mean? It means Santa Claus lives at the axis mundi where yggdrasil, the magic work ash of Welsh mythology has, uhm, taken root. Santa Claus flies, this is what shaman do. Santa Claus is the master of the reindeer, the animal most associated with the amanita muscaria. [7:01:00] Santa Claus is aided in his work by troops of elves. And what is the work of Santa Claus? To build toys for children. Remember the DMT thing saying “Look at this! Look


the DMT thing saying “Look at this! Look at this!” Well those were off duty elves, clearly. So here are all the motifs and I believe that for children in our culture that all the christer stuff is not what christmas [7:01:30] is about. Christmas is about standing in front of the tree on christmas morning with the gifts arrayed and the twinkling lights on. Well that tree is the tree that the amanita muscaria forms it’s symbiotic relationship to. It’s always spruce or pine that it has a mycorrhizal relationship to. So the number of motifs relating Santa Claus to a cult of amanita muscaria- there’s almost nothing but relational [7:02:00] motifs there. And yet if you suggest this to people they just back away in horror, you know? Well, uhm, these hallucinogenic plants seem clustered in the new world in two areas. The first area is, uhm, the Sierra Mazateca of central Mexico and related areas. And there you


of central Mexico and related areas. And there you have a number of things overlapping. You have [7:02:30], uhm, the- a- a mushroom area of multiple species where, unlike the [quaquatal?] shim-sham [flingut?] language area, in this central mexican langua- uhm, area they absolutely did use and discover these mushrooms. And we have these things called mushroom stones that, uhm, go, uhm, 2500 b.c.. So the mushroom religions is truly archaic in Mexico. [7:03:00] In the same cultural area you have the, uhm, the morning glory seeds that come from


ipomoea purpurea and- and related hybrids. Are you all familiar with these? This is a psychedelic plant that you can grow yourself and take. Don’t buy the packages of seeds and take them because, uhm, a benevolent government has made sure that they are soaked in horrendous poison so that you can’t [7:03:30] get loaded on them. Uhm, but you can grow a crop out of them that will be toxin free. And this is a tremendous visionary intoxicant. It takes a couple hundred of these seeds but in that same area, strangely enough, there’s another morning glory, [Named here. Can’t find it on the web], it used to be called [?], that, as few as thirteen seeds will flatten you. [7:04:00] Now it’s interesting, as long as we’re talking about morni- uhm, morning glory seeds, to note that pure unit volume, per by weight, probably the strongest plant hallucinogen in the world is,


the strongest plant hallucinogen in the world is, uhm, hawaiian baby woodrose. And yet there is no record of any culture ever utilizing that. It, uhm- there are thirteen species of argyreia. It’s called [7:04:30] hawaiian baby woodrose but it has nothing to do with Hawaii, it’s native to India. There are thirteen species of argyreia scattered from southern India out to Fiji and all contain ergot like, LSD like, compounds like chanoclavine and so forth. These- I got started on morning glory seeds because they were available. But don’t sell this stuff short folks. I mean, it’ll give you a ride you’ll [7:05:00] never forget. Uhm, and the baby woodrose even moreso. Be very careful with the hawaiian baby woodrose because it contains cardioactive glycosides and, you know, if you, you know, maybe six seeds will do you. Twelve seeds might well plant you. And twelve seeds will fit on a


plant you. And twelve seeds will fit on a tablespoon. So this is nothing to start choking down in large amounts. Yea. [7:05:30]


Audience: [Inaudible]

TM: Yes and could be extracted in a fairly simple fil- filtration system. Yea, good point. Yea.

Audience: [My question is are they dry? Do you grind them up?]

TM: You- Well they are dry. They’re little crescent shape dry things. Yea grind them in a braun grinder and, uhm, uhm…

Audience: Do you mix them with anything?

TM: Apple sauce is the favorite carrier for these disgusting things, or milkshakes. Uhm, but it would be good [7:06:00]

Transcribed by Paul Mullins

[7:06:00]

TM: “Um… But it would be good to look into doing a little chemistry - the emetic in the morning glories is estracumerone, not the cardioactive glycoside in argeria nervosa but in ipomea purpurea it’s.. uh…estracumerone and you could devise a simple chemical system for removing that and I think LSD.. w-you know...have you ever had what is called “Woodrose LSD”? Well it’s wonderful! It’s unlike LSD, it’s more like psilocybin because it is highly visionary; [7:06:30]and one of the things about these morning glories is.. You know… I don’t know whether we have to talk about Rupert’s theory or what… but it’s just an archive of Mayan and Toltec imagery, I mean, you take this stuff and you’re there in the pyramidal complex on the day of Venus’s heliacal rising when they do their thing… I mean it’s pretty amazing.”

Audience: [Inaudible][7:07:00]