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0bfa7f74799e-97 | Australia is again singularly poor in known hallucinogens. I always say in known hallucinogens, because somebody could go out into these places and come up with something brand new, something that we’ve overlooked. This is a great challenge for fieldworkers.
The other thing I want to say, and then I’ll stop for today,... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-98 | In other words, you make a small offering on the altar, and that henceforth becomes part of the setting of the thing. It’s like the notion of the Tao of the ancestors; when you take one of these ancient hallucinogens you are locking into the morphogenetic fields of all the people who ever took it. How else are we to ex... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-99 | Well, we’re not going to have a clear understanding of the historical development of Chinese thought and institutions unless we know what their relationship to the invisible world precisely was, and I think that the indigenous tradition of shamanism, which then became Taoism, which became the real substratum of Chinese... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-100 | Well, hopefully you turned some of this over in your minds in the time that we were apart. I certainly did, in the sense of trying to figure out what I had missed and whose concerns had not been met. What I came up with was your interest in the specifics of time, place, and manner, which should certainly be covered bec... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-101 | You have to know, pharmacologically speaking, the window of effective activity. Every drug, every compound has a profile which you can imagine as a linear spectrum. Below a certain amount it’s undetectable, above that amount it becomes detectable, first as this CNS arousal that I mentioned yesterday and then as a full-... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-102 | In pharmacology, one of the parameters that they establish is an LD50, which is a fairly unpleasant concept which you should nevertheless be informed of. LD50 means lethal dose 50. This means that we have 100 mice and we give them an unknown drug; at the point where half of them die, that is the LD50 dose of that compo... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-103 | We’ve talked so much about hallucination here, and always because of my particular bent which I have unconsciously transferred to you we’re talking about visual hallucinations, but all psychedelic explorers should be aware of the concept of what is called a cognitive hallucination. This is a much more insidious phenome... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-104 | A friend of mine had never taken mushrooms and was very concerned about how to do it and got the instructions from me — silent darkness, quiet room, stay sitting — and took them in his room in silent darkness. At about the hour and a half point he realized with a demonic chuckle that I had been kidding, I had been putt... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-105 | The practical fallout from this in terms of psychedelic research is what we call the “chained to a tree technique,” which is where you just chain yourself to a tree, and providing you don’t hang yourself with the chain, this cuts down the possibility of doing something peculiar. With psychedelics this doesn’t tend to b... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-106 | Yes, you can. I’m only speaking from my own experience, and I may have an odd take on it, because God knows, I’m odd, but to my mind the ideal situation is to have the sitter two rooms away, and to have a doorbell or the equivalent, because if the sitter is with you, you start to analyze the sitter. As someone once sai... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-107 | That’s called becoming a victim of the transference. All psychotherapists are aware of this. The transference is when you get dragged into the other person’s system of values or delusions. There’s even a name for this in clinical psychology: it’s called allophrenia. Allophrenia is schizophrenic behavior on the part of ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-108 | Then there’s the question of doing it with another person, meaning that the other person is going to be stoned too, and this has its own pitfalls and ambiguities. If it’s your lover, your sexual partner, then in my opinion that’s probably the best way to spend your time. If it’s not, then the sky’s the limit. You’re go... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-109 | I have never felt that the primary use of these things was to cure what is called in modern parlance “neurosis,” what I call “unhappiness.” It isn’t for that. This may be the influence of Jung in my background. Jung felt that there was no such thing as normality, that the task of life was what he called individuation, ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-110 | I find myself talking to psychologists a lot — because this is where this has been seized upon, because it does perturb the dynamics of the psyche — but for instance, I don’t think you should give people hospitalized for psychotic behavior psychedelics. They are having enough trouble. They are being overwhelmed by the ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-111 | Yes, I think so. Rarely in a plant where you have a psychoactive compound will it occur all by itself. For instance, in the peyote cactus, there is mescaline, there is N-methylmescaline, there is anhalamine, anhalinine, there’s a whole family, about a dozen of these things. Similarly, in the coca bush: cocaine, several... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-112 | Even in cases where there isn’t a detectably variant spectrum of compounds present — for instance, in Stropharia cubensis there are really only two active principles: psilocybin and psilocin, and psilocin is the dephosphorylated ester of psilocybin, so they are basically the same compound. Nevertheless, if you talk to ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-113 | In terms of the theory of morphogenetic resonance — some of you probably follow Rupert’s ideas and Rupert himself — he problem is that the morphogenetic field is very difficult for instruments to detect. So far the only instrument I think that can detect it is the human mind. This probably means that it’s perturbing a ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-114 | I don’t know quite what to make of it. I don’t know why, and Claudio Naranjo gave harmaline to urban people in Santiago, Chile — stockbrokers and advertising executives, people who have no connection to the jungle — and they reported jaguars, giant snakes, jungles and black people. This is a tremendously fertile area f... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-115 | Audience: I’d like to play devil’s advocate, if I can for a minute, about this whole idea that certain plants or certain substances have certain attributes or certain places that they take people to. I’ve had the ideation that you’re talking about — the visualization of the snakes, the cats, the jungle, the pyramids, t... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-116 | Well, what does that mean? I have no idea. First of all, the possibilities seem to be that what we call styles or motifs are actually categories in the unconscious, but the amazing thing about it, having looked at the Italian Baroque, Dynastic Egypt, and Art Deco, is that you can also say to it, “Surprise me,” and sudd... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-117 | Audience: My feeling about it is that those experiences are available to anybody in various states, with various ways to get there, and I don’t feel that it is mutually exclusive to say that some substances do seem to have a certain predilection for certain kinds of experiences. I’ve had both feelings about it, that th... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-118 | I said something like this a few weeks ago at the John Ford Theater in L.A., and this guy got up and said, “So why don’t you take more?” which I think is a very interesting question, very valid for me, personally. Our whole lives, we conceive of spiritual development as looking for the answer: is it Taoism? Is it diet?... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-119 | So the answer to the question, “Why don’t you take more?” is because I am attached, basically. It is entirely my own attachments that now impede my spiritual growth. Nobody is holding me back, nothing is holding me back except my sense of the awesomeness of what is now possible. This is true of everybody who reaches a ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-120 | Once you have the psychedelic tool in hand, then real choices have to be made. What is this to you? Is it simply something that you do once or twice a year to affirm to yourself that it’s possible? Is it something that you can use in some way for your good and the world’s? That’s sort of where I have come to rest, and ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-121 | It’s a different problem, an embarrassment of riches, an embarrassment of access to past, present, future, alien dimensions, mantra-hoarding elves and promise-bearing demons. Strangely enough, it creates a certain kind of conservatism. I don’t think that everybody realizes this. Many people take psychedelics in order t... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-122 | Well, it threatens to put anybody out of a job, because eventually the contradictions of living in this low-level slice of reality will just become unbearable. This actually happened in the ‘60s, many people quit and dropped out for many reasons, but the seed of all that talk is that you just say, “This is absurd, I am... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-123 | Carlos Castenada has Don Juan say, “You must lose your personal history.” I don’t know whether Don Juan is a real person or whether he ever said that, but it’s interesting, that notion. How many of us would be willing to become unrecognizable to ourselves? And yet obviously that’s the path that one is on, and so then y... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-124 | Audience: The two words that struck me were “adore” and “worship.” On Friday night Matthew Fox quoted, “We have come to a point in history where we must either find some form of meaningful worship or commit suicide,” and somehow that quote came back when you mentioned, “When one may reach that point of the penultimate ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-125 | You have to have the personal experience of something to worship: this is what has been lacking. What the churches are peddling is high abstraction, and you really have to work yourself up into a lather to be able to accept that as worthy of that kind of attention. The psychedelic subset of society is into an experienc... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-126 | We have to view life as an opportunity. What are you doing with it? Are you afraid of it? Some people live their lives and apparently what they are doing is arranging their deathbed scene. They want it to take place in a large baronial house with clipped green lawns, acres in surround, they want the room in which they ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-127 | We are alive, there’s no contest about that. It’s extremely improbable that we should be alive, that we should be here thinking, feeling, sharing. The fact that we’re alive throws open the whole game, means anything is probably possible, but I doubt that it’s easy. I’ll bet that you have to be very smart to figure out ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-128 | OK, moving through these things and discussing dosage, probably in order of the likelihood of your encountering them. Mushrooms: I feel that people who weigh around 140 pounds should take five dried grams. This is a stiff hit. This is a committed hit. There will be difficult moments in a five gram trip, but on the othe... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-129 | The main shift in the use pattern with LSD is: it may have been childish, but the style of the ‘60s was, “How many mics can you bolt down?” “Have you had the 500? Have you had the 1,000? Have you had the 2,000?” Eventually it becomes moot because you just dissolve into shimmering atoms for longer and longer periods of ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-130 | So, committed doses. Then, because you’re going to take a committed dose, inform yourself of the medical and pharmacological chitchat on the matter so that you can feel reassured. Talk to a heart specialist, questions like, “If my heart is pounding, does that mean I am having a heart attack? What is a fibrillation and ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-131 | It can have many manifestations. It can be chills, tremoring, knotted stomach, nausea, restlessness, so forth and so on. This is what I call, taking a page from the engineering book, “Q.” “Q” in engineering circles is vibration in a physical system. When they launch the space shuttle, if you listen to the radio chitcha... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-132 | Audience: I have taken very large doses of LSD at times and it’s always seemed to me that it’s very difficult to process all that’s going on. The biocomputer shut downs for a while, and like you said, I forget.
Yes, it overloads, it just shunts it past you. What do we need to cover here? DMT, psilocybin, LSD. MDMA, wh... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-133 | Audience: You can snort ketamine, can’t you, though?
You can, but I’ve heard that it’s dangerous. When they give it as an anesthetic it’s 600 mg IV push, which must be just like being struck from behind by a freight train. I’m sure you never know what hit you. I mean, imagine an exploratory dose is 100 intramuscular, ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-134 | I must say about ketamine that it did something to me that nothing else has ever done, which is that it erodes the observer in a way that the indoles don’t. On ketamine you can get so out there that it is a major intellectual breakthrough to realize that you’re on a drug, in other words, there’s this situation and it s... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-135 | Yes, maybe this is the white light. Maybe this is what these early LSD people were so enamored of, getting so far into it that you don’t even know you’re into it, because you can’t remember where you started from. It’s not what I’m shooting for because I always want to bring stuff back. My belief is that this stuff is ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-136 | I think it begins with self-reflection. In other words, the question, “What is happening?” I don’t think animals ever ask that question. For animals, what’s happening is what’s happening, but we are capable of creating a state of distance and posing the question, “What is happening?” and at that point in the trip it me... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-137 | By this means, this, “Let’s see what happens,” approach to things, the ideas come in the mental dimension. The, “Let’s see what happens,” translates those of them that can be translated into three-dimensional space. “Let’s plant this plant, let’s slaughter this animal, let’s try sex this way, let’s go over that hill th... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-138 | Now, I don’t know whether this is something innate in us or whether it is somehow programmed in from the planet at different levels. It’s very interesting, I don’t know how many of you are aware of this, but there are leafcutter ants in the tropics, they are a major part of life in the tropics, and they march in column... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-139 | This is precisely, in my model, what is happening with the human species at a more complex level. In other words, by domesticating cattle we have set up an environment that is very favorable to the growth and appearance of what would otherwise be a very rare deep forest mushroom, but because we domesticate cattle and c... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-140 | In these Neolithic and Paleolithic societies this tendency of the ego to tumorize and grow in individuals was kept down by a chemical regulator, which was the psychedelic experience. It was part of the food chain and it suppressed ego, much in the way that drugs are given in prisons to suppress libido, because it’s har... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-141 | Audience: Have you seen a difference in the way men and women react to psychedelics, given the fact that perhaps men embody a stronger male ego than women? My other question has to do with the role of observer ego when you’re doing drugs, whether it’s marijuana or alcohol or especially psychedelics. Sitting here, think... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-142 | If you don’t have a strong ego structure, chances are you’re not a heavy-duty male dominator, because they’re sort of antithetical. I think probably cannabis was a major ego dissolver and that all these things have been used this way, and if that works for you, that’s fine. I didn’t take psychedelics to lose my ego. Al... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-143 | In a way, the women outsmarted themselves because they had, not control in the conscious sense, but they were sitting in the front of the canoe and then they invented agriculture and that undercut their own position, because the vast repository of plant knowledge that had been the secret knowledge of women no longer re... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-144 | it’s just steady work, and it’s lots of fun if you do it with your friends. The cliched notion about aboriginal peoples is that women chatter, this phrase, “the chattering of women” in primitive situations. It really is true that women avail themselves of language much more than men in these preliterate situations. The... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-145 | Data, information. How could you ever understand the use and location of 600 plants or more unless you had a tremendously evolved vocabulary for this kind of thing? | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-146 | Audience: The physical weakness that follows psilocybin, is there any way to prevent that?
These things take energy. Obviously, during the trip energy is being sucked into the moment. A trip is hard work even if you’re sitting still, so then there’s going to be an energy debt. One way of assessing the toxicity of a dr... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-147 | The interesting exception to this, and it always seems to cut my way in terms of favoring the ones I think are most interesting, DMT is again the anomaly here. DMT is the most powerful hallucinogen there is. If it gets stronger than that I don’t want to know about it. 15 minutes after you do it, you feel as though as y... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-148 | I think DMT is absolutely fascinating from every point of view. Why is it so benign? Why is it so powerful? Why is it so short acting? Why is it so hard to get any? That’s the $64 question. Believe me, every book on drugs that you pick up says it’s easily made, they ask you to believe that people are making it in their... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-149 | like brown sugar, it’s a mess. We were appalled, we got samples of underground DMT and ran high pressure liquid gas chromatography on them, and it literally looked like the guy swept the floor. These people had actually done it. I wouldn’t have given it to a rat, much less a human being. The notion of someone actually ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-150 | minutes to come on and lasts about 45 minutes. That’s why if you read in the literature, “How long does DMT last?” it will always say 45 minutes. If you smoke it, the peak experience lasts 400 seconds, something like that. It’s extreme, that’s why it’s so astonishing, because it is so intense and the onset is so sudden... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-151 | Sometimes people come out of it saying, “What happened?” “Have we done it yet, or was there an earthquake and the roof fell on me just as we were about to do it?” It has the quality of an event rather than an experience, and also it has the quality of an event because it does not touch the core observer. You are not ch... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-152 | They are day and night. 5-MeO-DMT, some people like it. It’s a feeling, that’s what it’s been for me. It’s this huge feeling that kind of sweeps through you, and it’s velvety. It’s hard to describe, but the main thing that I’m noticing when it’s happening is that I am not hallucinating. Of course, the main thing that’s... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-153 | For me, DMT is the center of the mystery. I fear it, I love it, I thank God for it, I wonder if I’ll ever understand it. It takes a huge mustering of courage on my part to do it. I mean, we talk, talk, talk: change, transformation, other dimensions. This is not talk when you do it. You just do not know the parameters. ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-154 | What happens to me when I do it is that there is an initial period of hysteria and confusion. It’s almost as though time speeds up, even before you take the first hit. Many people say, “Just before you do DMT there’s this funny kind of impression in the room,” almost as though there is backwash from the event about to ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-155 | sounds like. It sounds like your body has just been wadded up and thrown into a corner and now you’re a radio signal approximately four lightseconds in diameter spreading out through an alien universe, and the next impression is of a cheer. It’s, “Hoorah! Welcome, welcome!” It’s them, they’re waiting and they can hardl... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-156 | The impression, don’t ask me why, the impression is of being underground, even though it’s a huge vaulted space and highly colored. What is, of course, riveting my attention are these beings. They’re small, and they’re like I’ve described them, as machine elves. They seem partially machine-like and partially elf-like. ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-157 | What are these things? Devices? Toys? Works of art? Objects? Whatever they are, they are amazing, and you look into it and they seem to be shifting, even though they’re made of metal and glass and gems and pulsating. Everything is migrating and shifting and changing and they say, “Look at this one!” It’s the most aston... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-158 | Notice that no common dictionary is necessary here. If you’re Witoto and I’m Polish, I still see what you mean, because what you mean is an objectified three-dimensional modality, not a string of Witoto words, and it’s saying, “Do this, do what we are doing!” It took me about 15 trips to get this far, and then I began ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-159 | So then, as is the case with most things, if you look long enough you discover precursors. What I discovered in a wonderful book, and any one of you would love this book, I’m sure. It doesn’t deal with the psychedelic experience by name, but it is a psychedelic book. It’s called The Phenomenon of Life by Hans Jonas, an... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-160 | It happens like this: first of all, I form the wish for it to happen. I usually follow a line I learned in an old I Love Lucy rerun where she’s explaining to Ethel how she contacts flying saucers and she says, “I just say, “Come in, little green men! Come in, little green men!”” So on mushrooms I do this, I say, “Come ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-161 | In a universe where there were no people, that would be a pretty far-fetched idea, but the fact that we already possess language seems to argue that we are in the process of continually evolving new applications for our bodies. When spoken language burst onto the scene 35,000 years ago, by most estimates — think of it:... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-162 | Yes, that’s right. In our own tradition, “In principio erat Verbum, et Verbo caro factum est,” in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh. That’s the whole story. What we need to do is to pass through this transition and make the Word flesh. In other words, to somehow objectify the Word. Believe me, I t... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-163 | I’ve noticed on psychedelics, and again, I don’t know whether this is a false trail or whether this is part of the mystery, but I’ve noticed on psychedelics that if you get a person between yourself and a candle so that you have them in profile, and they are raving and you can see the candle past them, there’s somethin... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-164 | Because I’m a public speaker, because I work with language, I think about these things a fair bit. It seems to me that language begins in total inarticulation, basically “um, erm, ungh” kind of stuff, and then it goes on to operational speech: “Give me this, bring me that, change my diapers,” this kind of thing. Then y... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-165 | It seems to me that it’s possible to just keep going, and one of the curious things about the way we think about language is that when we talk about clear language, we always use visual metaphors. To understand someone you say, “I see what you mean.” Seeing is the sense that we trust. “He spoke clearly,” is a visual me... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-166 | Audience: Earlier you were talking about this possibility, and you were saying, “I can’t imagine how we would do this,” and you started talking about it, and to me it felt like you were talking about something hovering. At that point I could almost see that it would be possible to continue. When you said “hovering,” I ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-167 | Our little company sells ayahuasca songs. Well, they are audio recordings, but they are visual works of art. How they sound doesn’t matter, it’s how they look. When you’re sitting in a blackened hut with these people you’ll hear someone lay down a riff which manifests as a flourescent pink line with grey undershading, ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-168 | Yes. It’s a kind of glossolalia, or that’s what we would have to call it. Glossolalia, as you all probably know, is speaking in tongues, but this has characteristics that glossolalia doesn’t have. For one thing, people who do glossolalia have a kind of disconnectedness from it. In other words, in these Pentecostal chur... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-169 | Audience: The point I was trying to get at is that in order to form these sounds there’s some sort of electronic, neurological something going on in the synapses to cause the muscles to form the sounds, and there’s a radiation of electric energy that starts the mechanical-acoustical coupling to the vocal chords, and in... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-170 | True, although it is interesting that sound can be used to form holograms, which are three- dimensional objects. In other words, there are what are known as acoustical holograms, not generated by lasers, but generated by patterns of interference that are acoustic waves. For years, in the psychedelic states I could hear... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-171 | like that. It’s far removed from English, it sounds to me like a very primitive language. The image that comes to my mind is of pygmies around a fire, one guy raving. He’s telling a story. There’s something in there; it feels like meaning, but it doesn’t compute to a dictionary. When you do it on your own you just can ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-172 | Audience: Did you just make that up? Did you have any images? Can you describe what was going on inside of you when you were doing that?
I was trying to stand aside, I was trying to not do anything to it, I was just trying to let it be, because there will be a part of it and I’ll think as it goes by, “Hmm, sounds Fren... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-173 | I think that language goes through tremendous periods of impoverishment, and I think that was one. The origin point of language is placed at about 35,000 years ago, although on what basis they do this I’m not sure. There is a flute in existence that’s 26,000 years old. That’s pretty interesting, and that’s not the Muse... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-174 | The hallucinogen is a monoamine, and then if you inhibit the monoamine oxidase, which is the compound which inhibits the monoamine, then the monoamine will accumulate. It’s important to know this because we tend to move in a yuppie environment, and a typical yuppie buffet of good burgundies and good brie is just going ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-175 | If somebody left the tribe, left the forest and went to Kampala and got a job and stopped eating so many bananas, they immediately appeared to become mentally ill. This is because they were then finally forced to confront the fact that on the natch they could not produce enough serotonin to stay balanced, so this is an... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-176 | One of the things that I mentioned the other night is the preservation of infantile characteristics as a part of our species, not necessarily simply infantilism psychologically, but also our hairlessness, for instance. More primate babies are born hairless, but we’re the ones who stay hairless the whole time. The suppr... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-177 | MAO is one of the most easily influenced of these internal enzyme systems because there are MAO inhibitors in so many things that are human foods — pulses, all beans, fish, cheeses, dairy products, so forth and so on — the very things that were probably fairly prominent in the primitive diet. All monoamines will be mor... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-178 | Yes, well it’s sort of hard to nail this down. When people first started doing psychedelic research they thought — it was the so-called psychotomimetic theory of psychedelics — that these things make you crazy, therefore being crazy must be a natural state of producing these things. So for instance, they measured DMT i... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-179 | The reason that is advanced for this is that these are the social animals, the insects and the human beings, wherever you have intense social activity. For instance, in some species a male and a female will encounter each other only once in the life of each individual, then have sex and that’s it. There is no social li... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-180 | Audience: Let me ask a chemical question. I have never done these substances that you’re talking about, specifically N,N-DMT and 5-MeO-DMT and what you’re talking about as ayahuasca, which is a hybrid of an MAOI and DMT. Those are the chemical names of these substances. Are there generic names or so-called street names... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-181 | If that’s your predilection, if you’re comfortable with that. If you’re uncomfortable with that, get a friend. Is that your question?
Audience: I guess that’s my question, because it seems to me from reading Stan Grof’s books that the point he makes is that these substances are physiologically very safe. The danger is... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-182 | This is an example of how this works: I was at Sarnath once, outside of Benares. Sarnath is the place where Buddha preached his first sermon after attaining enlightenment. He was enlightened at Bodh Gaya and then he walked south many miles to the deer park at Sarnath and gave his first sermon there. There’s a stupa the... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-183 | They just keep getting larger and larger, and so I said, “I’m going to make this go away by not looking, and I’m just going to sit like this,” and I sat like this, not moving, until the guy’s feet entered my field of vision. Then I didn’t move, I didn’t say anything. I just looked up, and he said, “You’re from which pl... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-184 | and I just put my head down and waited an hour. When I looked up they were gone, but only in that circumstance of being so stoned would I have ever behaved that way. The normal tourist reaction is, and they watch this happen to you, you just go into a tailspin of, “It’s their country, everybody’s a person, I’m a strang... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-185 | name is Nathan Jones, I’m from Brooklyn, New York. I’ve been in India three and a half months and I hate it,” and the guy said, “Ooh, you’re great, baba! You’re reading my mind!” You’ve got to be fast, that’s all there is to it. | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-186 | Audience: You’ve said that the mushroom tends to create its own agenda. You’ve also given examples of how you’ve directed it. So which of those is true? Are there ways to direct it to specific regions by doing specific things, whether you want to deal with certain issues like death or the body, or to get into certain r... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-187 | My father used to say, “You can drive a horse to water but a pencil must be lead,” and I think that’s sort of the situation with the mushroom. If the question pleases it, it will answer. If the question doesn’t please it, you’ll hear about it. It is amazing how it gives people what they need. You know that Rolling Ston... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-188 | The mushroom is very, very weird. I’ll tell one more story and then I’ll try to get off stories. I was in Malibu with all these fancy film people and we went out to dinner; Ralph Abraham was there, too. There was this French woman there, a film producer, and she was seated next to me at dinner, and before dinner we had... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-189 | Audience: How do you remember to bring back what you’ve learned?
That’s a good question, that’s an important question, that’s a key question. Roland Fischer, who was a great psychedelic researcher with psilocybin and later retired to Mallorca to be Robert Graves’ next door neighbor, coined the phrase “state-bounded.” ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-190 | The dream is not truly lost in that situation where you wake up and it melts away. The proof of this, and I’m sure you all have had this experience is that you go off about your daily business and then there will be, almost always by coincidence, an image, a chance phrase, a view of a street or something, and it will c... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-191 | Now, this state-bounded thing: it’s important to notice, we talk about how dreams are state-bounded, how psychedelic experiences are state-bounded, but what we fail to notice, usually, is that ordinary reality is state-bounded. If I were to ask any one of you, “What did you discuss with the person you had lunch with ye... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-192 | One thing these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life. Most of it is just like a river flowing by, and every once in a while we check to see if the river is still flowing by, but we don’t attempt to retain it. Memory training is great psych... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-193 | The act of remembering this long list of things is the act of mentally moving through this imaginary building. When you come to the water fountain, the clue will be there, when you pass the fire extinguishers in your mind, the emblem you place there will be there. I know this sounds highly unworkable and unwieldy, but ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-194 | If any of you are interested in this, the last word is The Art of Memory by Frances Yates, who was a wonderful woman, a great scholar of Renaissance magic. The final trick is to make the image extremely vivid, so that for instance, if you’re about to give a speech to your collegium on the seven deadly sins, one of thes... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-195 | No, I’m not paranoid about it. If they wanted me they should have come a long time ago, because I was much more vulnerable then. I’ve sort of covered my ass. Naturally, if you speak about these things you can’t do anything particularly illegal. Perhaps I’m foolish, in the sense that I shouldn’t be worried about being a... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-196 | We have to create a new option. All social progress is made by people taking chances. If I am an anomaly, some kind of dangerous sociopath, then my message will be swamped and lost in the noise of the tumult of the world, because there are thousands of messages out there. If, on the other hand, this is a great and impo... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
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