Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)

8/9/2019 Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)

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A Terence McKenna Audio Archive

Podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon

Part 2

Transcribed by Dominator Culture

http://dominatorculture.com/

http://dominatorculture.com/http://dominatorculture.com/http://dominatorculture.com/


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List of Talks:

Effects of Psychedelics on Society (Podcast 365) ……………………………………...…… 5

Suggested Reading List (Podcast 366) …………………………………..……………...….. 20

The Evolution of a Psychedelic Thinker (Podcast 367) …………………………………… 30

Psychedelics and the Feminine (Podcast 368) ………...…………………………………… 48

A Psychedelic Point of View (Podcast 378) ……………………………………………….. 61

A Stiff Does of Psychedelics (Podcast 381) ……………………………………………….. 74

The Psychedelic Option (Podcast 382) …………………...……………………………….. 87

Loose Ends Time (Podcast 386) …………………………………………………………. 106

Monogamy, Marriage, and Neurosis (Podcast 390) ………………………………………. 120

Nothing Lasts (Podcast 391) ……………………………………………………………... 136

Time Travel, Psychedelics, & Physics (Podcast 400) ………………..…………………….. 151


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Effects of Psychedelics on Society

What I sort of want to talk about this morning and I can be lead away from it if you have

other considerations. It’s pretty clear from how this group is relating and coming on thateverybody has come to some resolution about this in their own lives. What’s become more

and more interesting to me as I’ve talked to more people and also if you stay in a field like

this, you eventually get to meet everybody. You get to meet Albert Hoffman and Sasha

Shulgin and Leary and Lily and all these people and you begin to have a view of how all

these people viewed it. So what I wanted to talk about this morning and lead it toward your

concern with the alien intelligence is, I wanted to talk about the effect that psychedelics are

having and I believe will have on society in general, and at deeper levels simply than drug

laws and government campaigns of abstinence but more on the level of how it’s impacting in

philosophy and science and the social sciences. I think we are winning. The psychedelic viewpoint is becoming more and more legitimate but psychedelic drugs are not. That’s the

odd paradox of it.

This has a lot to do with the history of science over the past hundred years. What we call

modern science or what you could almost call super-science, not the notebook jottings of

naturalists and the collated accounts of travelers, but big science where millions, hundreds of

millions of dollars are spent on instruments and coordinated teams of people to attack

problems. This style of science that has grown up in the 20th century has had a very

interesting consequence because it is spread out over more than a generation; we all have

grown up with it and haven’t really realized what an unusual situation we are living in. We

are living in a state of constant scientific revolution.

There is not a single area that you can name that is now seen as it was seen, let’s pick a

number, a hundred years ago. Nothing is left of the worldview of one hundred years

ago. One hundred years ago, atoms were billiard balls, the basic building block of the

universe – indivisible. One hundred years ago, the position of biology was that Darwinian

mechanics had just been enunciated in the 1850s and was making its way against an

orthodoxy, which held that the Earth had been created in 4004 BC. Less than one hundred

years ago, when the cave painting of Lascaux and Altamira in Southern France and Spain were first discovered and experts came from Paris to view them, after looking the caves over

the experts announced that these paintings were obviously done by soldiers in the army of

Napoleon who had overwintered there in 1816 and 17. Continental drift was

unknown. The fact that the continent of Africa had an edge that fit exactly against the edge

of the continent of South America was mentioned in textbooks as an example of God’s

sense of humor. It was not seen to signal anything.


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I can’t think of an area in science where we have retained the vision that we had then. The

Earth was thought to be ultimately stable, pretty much as it had been on the day of creation

even by the British geologists who were reacting against the story of biblical creation. But

there’s one area where surprisingly little has happened and it is strangely enough, the area of

the human mind. Strides were made in the early part of the 20th

century by describing theunconscious but it’s important to remember that some of the hottest therapies that passed

through a place like Esalen, which would be things like hypnotherapy, mesmerism –

mesmerism had its great heyday in the 1890s of the last century – colonic therapy brought to

a peak in Germany in the 1870s. Reflexology, a 19th century theory. Homeopathy, a theory

developed in late 19th, early 20th century. So we’ve not had in place really new models of the

mind. The body, because of Wilhelm Reich and the many, many schools he spawned as

either his progeny or in reaction to his thought, have given us new handles on the

relationship of psychology to the body. But in the area of the mind, it’s been pretty much

left alone. Well now to go back to the previous example of these other areas where scientific

revolutions were made – they were true revolutions. They were not fine tunings or little

additions of details but complete overthrow of old paradigms and the establishment of new

ones.

The Earth went from being a solid body with continents pretty much in the same place since

creation to a complex system of convection flows where continents are brought together and

broken apart. Man instead of being seen as the highest product of creation, a descent

slightly beneath the angels is instead seen as a primate, a specialized monkey of a certain

sort. The hard atoms, the indivisible atoms of 19th century physics give way to fields first of

all – fields which are characterized by action at a distance which had always been excludedpreviously. Reason dictated that action at a distance was a kind of superstition. Then James

Clerk Maxwell demonstrated that these fields really exist. So in each of these areas, a total

revolution took place. Now the reason that psychology was immune to this I think was

because we did not have the tools to advance it. They came to us out of ethnography and

anthropology, out of the work of Wasson and Hoffman and earlier, Havelock Ellis and Weir

Mitchell, Henri Michaux – all the people who worked with psychedelics. At first it was

worked with by artists, by literary people, by people who were interested in expanding their

own sensation but slowly it came to be realized that it was an insight into the mind, not into

the nature of it so much, which I think still remains a mystery but simply into its size. Thatthe mind is a far bigger domain than we ever imagined.

We have somehow the idea that the mind is in the head. It’s made by the brain and

therefore it must be a smaller and less inclusive domain than the domain in which it is

embedded. But I brought along an example here – this is a box and this box has in it a box

that is exactly the same size as it is. This demonstrates how even in three-dimensional


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reality, expectation can be confounded. This ‘which is inside the box’ is itself a box

indistinguishable from this one and then that one goes in there like that and can be closed

into this. Now that’s what we’re here to talk about. It’s just how to do that. How to take a

world with a world in it and put it into the world in it and put the world in it outside of it.

What we’re talking about and what history is, I think, is an effort to exteriorize the soul and

interiorize the body. To make the fields of the lord that we all sense inside of us, meadows

that we can actually throw our clothes off and wander into. I think really what unites

psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination. Science, when it examines

the psychedelics as it will and must, is going to discover a revolution I believe that will put all

the previous revolutions in perspective and will show that they were merely anticipations of

finding out this final unimaginable fact about nature. This weekend is called In The Light of

Nature . Nature, whenever you scratch its surface, has aspects that are unanticipated so when

they looked at the shape of the continents, they discovered continental drift. When Wallace

and Darwin looked at the distribution of butterflies over the Indonesian Islands, theysuddenly had a vision of the origin of species and how that worked. The psychedelics are

this immense tool for the inspection of our own nature and when we scratch it, when we

bring that tool to apply, we are not going to recognize ourselves. We talked a little bit last

night about LSD. A kind of funny thing about LSD was that it was the right drug for the

right time in that it fulfilled the psychological theories of the world into which it came. Now

this may have something to do with the fact that it was psychologists who were keen to

promote it. We’ll never know. The thing seems to be inextricably wedded together. But

LSD made possible the recovery of traumatic material, lucid communication, re-visioning of

self-image and the energy to break out of habit patterns and this sort of thing. What wasabsent in LSD was any reference back into the natural world.

The entire drug phenomenon of the 1960s happened without the concept of shamanism to

help it along. Maybe Gary Snyder said something about it once in a seminar but it was not

heard by most people because what was being stressed about LSD was its utter newness. I

remember people saying that it had been created to save us from the brink of atomic

catastrophe. It had come into the world at the exact proper time to be there when we

needed it. There was not a sense of history, you see. There was not a sense of

twenty/thirty/fifty thousand years of involvement with the psychedelic state. A society, adominant culture, always assumes that it is the most sophisticated of a long line of

precursors but as a matter of fact, the childishness and the sort of fragile un-informedness

that the hip people saw in the straight people in the 60s was a phenomenon that everyone

shared. Everyone was naïve. Everyone was more simplistic than they should have been and

that’s why I think the first psychedelic revolution got into trouble because there was no

sense of history. There was no sense of: have societies ever integrated something like this


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and what then did they become? What kind of societies can live in the light of the

psychedelic experience?

There was no real discussion of that. Now this dimension of earth crisis has been added in

the intervening years. This was another aspect that was missing from the hippy thing to

some degree. Yes? No?

[Audience] - I’m sorry I don’t think it was. Because I recall the tremendous involvement with the Hippy’s in

the 60’s at Millbrook. There was a lot of attention paid to organic growing of food and of not abusing the

fruits of this Earth. There was tremendous involvement and it came out of the psychedelic and the LSD

culture.

[Audience] - It was the beginning of the back to the Earth movement.

But don’t you agree Nina that if you were to walk down Haight Street on a hot day in

August of 1967, ecological sensitivity would not be highly visible on the surface?

[Audience] – That’s true. That’s why Timothy Leary said get out of the city. Everybody should grow their

own food. That consciousness was there.

Well that was really the beginning of it. That it was the end of the Summer of Love when

they realized that they’d just been media’d to death and political things…they’d been

overrun. Then they moved into the countryside. Communal living in the country, which is

the tribalism. Which McLuhan was talking about in the 60s, not from the point of drugs but

of electronics. I think that was the beginning of the permission for Earth day, ecological

sensitivity. Now the great philosopher of the psychedelic community, to my mind, is RupertSheldrake. Rupert is a botanist, a natural scientist, a man in the tradition of Darwin and

Wallace.

We’re trying to say what is being realized, I think, is that the psychedelics ha ve always been

exerting a pressure on human beings. That we, from about 1600, something like that, pick a

date, from 1600 to 1960 - lost sight of that because we lived entirely in an industrial,

mechanistic, materialistic, reductionist, capitalist kind of society. But all other societies have

had some awareness, at least of nature if not of psychedelics, of nature forming the

aesthetic. Now we’re returning to this. There is an awareness that understanding man’s

place in nature is going to require psychedelics…integration of the psychedelic

experience. When we go into nature, and this gets to your question, when we look hard at

these tryptamine psychedelics and the plants they come from and the content of the

information. It seems to be very hard for people to bring it across, even having had ten or

fifteen thousand years to do so. Well then the awareness begins to grow that there is a

presence on this planet that we have previously missed that we have been so busy about the


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anthill business of building human culture that we have paid lip service to the power of

nature, to Gaia, to the Goddess. But I don’t think anybody has realized how real it is.

If you wanted to talk about Gaia, most people would place you in the category of spiritual or

religious. But I think talking about Gaia belongs in the category natural science and natural

history. Gaia is a regulating set of grids that are laid over this planet that keep it going in theright direction that stabilize certain kind of processes and damp others. The expression of

Gaia outside of culture is the botanical world, the world of plants. Man, woman, animal,

plants – the plants were the first ones to have a feminine approach, if you want to put it that

way. They invented the feminine approach before there was even femininity, if you want to

put it that way. In other words, nurturing, staying in one place, cooperation, integration and

regulation rather than dominance, conquest, mobility, these sorts of things that are then the

animal solution to the same problem. An orthodox evolutionary biologist tends to sneer at

plants because we all have the built in assumption that the mind is in the brain and if you

don’t have a brain, you don’t have a mind. Or if you do have a mind, it’s so low grade thatit’s just kind of a shimmer of perceptual awareness.

If you examine this proposition that the mind is in the brain, it doesn’t hold water at all. All

the miles and miles of electroencepolographic tracings that have been done, nobody has ever

correlated a thought with an electrical discharge in the brain. The closest they’ve gotten is to

correlate a kind state of state of focused awareness with a blip in the electrical activity of the

brain. When you’re told, prepare yourself for a question – then there is a measureable bit of

activity in the brain as if you reorient: ‘I’m about to get a question.’

[Audience] – How could they put together so incredibly complex? They’re measuring billions of neurons

operating at once.

You mean why this correlation hasn’t been?

Yes – true. But they’ve had fifty years to make good on their promise that they were going

to show us thought in the brain. Sherrington and those people, what was the famous

Spanish neuro-physiologist – Roman Y Cajal. Sherrington and all those people announced

this in the early 1920s, since then we’ve had super computers, super imaging systems,

microprobes, vast advances in the technologies they said they needed in order to make this

point. They have not made good. It’s interesting. There are a couple of areas. In 1952,

DNA, the structure of DNA was elicited. Well the scientific literature was full of predictions

of the cure of all diseases within fifteen years; certainly the elimination of all genetic

defects. A full understanding of what life is. Well then as they began to elucidate the

mechanisms of DNA – they turned out to be simply that – mechanisms, no more interesting

than a water faucet or a torsion belt or a weighted governor. The life that molecular biology


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seems to be able to describe is a life of chains and pulleys, falling weights and tightening

chains. There has not been a single step towards elucidating what it actually is. Its

mechanisms are better understood but not what it is. To the mind even more so, to the

point now where the people in the field, to each other, will admit that there’s a problem,

there’s a crisis. This past week there was a conference here called the Holonomicsconference. Karl Pribram’s theory of brain functioning, which is certainly state of the art

and out there, but it just recently had to be restructured and renamed - changed from the

holographic theory to the holonomic theory because the experimental data was not

supporting the model that they had.

This happens over and over again. So I think we’re too patient with science. Nobody

should be allowed more than fifty years to get their act together. If somebody claims…think

about it – we think of the 20th century as the most rapidly evolving century that there has

ever been. A few years ago, Kat and I took the children to Mexico to wander around

looking at the Mayan ruins. We were in San Cristobal de las Casas. Some of you may know,it’s high up in the mountains of Chiapas and there’s an immense cathedral there. It was built

in 1511! Columbus discovered America in 1492 – so that’s nineteen years after Columbus

had discovered America, in a world relying on galleons and horseflesh, the complete

conquest of a culture was totally fait accompli and building six hundred feet long with three

hundred foot ceilings were being put up all over Mexico. We went to the moon nineteen

years ago. Today we couldn’t put a lawn chair on the moon. You would think that by now

we would have buildings six hundred feet long with three hundred foot ceilings; have the

Indians all working for us and be looting the place of minerals. See there is…we tolerate too

much foot dragging and these scientists have been pontificating.

A real sore point for me in the claims of quantum physics. My God, how many conferences

are there going to be on the connection between quantum physics and consciousness before

somebody comes up with something better than a rap. The new position of the particle

physics community is: just give us six and a half billion dollars and a machine nineteen

kilometers in diameter and we will show you something. But five years ago we gave you

four billion dollars and you built the machine four and a half kilometers in diameter and

what you concluded out of that is that you need a bigger one. We’re living in a world where

people are starving, where people are dying of AIDS. I’m not saying that you have to justgive the money away to the poor, certainly nothing as radical as that – but if you want a

scientific frontier that has positive feedback into the human experience, then let’s take the

six and a half billion dollars and have a full assault on the mechanism of viruses in the

human cell so that we come out of it with an AIDS cure, of course, but we come out of it

also with a much deeper understanding of the mechanics of life. I think it’s time to begin to

call in the chips on these various disciplines which have been promising great things to us


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for the past thirty years. Where would psychedelic research be if it had been going on at full

funding since 1960 and hundreds of thousands of people well and healthy had taken it and

the plants of the world had been fully surveyed? The cultures of the world, databases have

been built of their folklore and this sort of thing. So we, and even though we represent a

fairly deconditioned subgroup, are still enthralled to the promises of a science, whosepromises begin to sound more and more hollow.

Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is - is reclaiming your own

experience. We expect Karl Sagan to explain it to us or the evening news. We don’t realize

all these people are just like we are. All of these people are utterly, utterly, utterly ordinary –

totally ordinary. I can’t impress upon you enough how ordinary everyone is. We drift in the

assumption that great men and women are at the helm and that deep thinkers are publishing

all of these books. It’s just not so. It’s a groping, it’s a feeling toward it and any one of us is

competent.

This whole cult of professionalism is just a shell game. The thing to do is to reclaim direct

experience and then insist for other people that that be dealt with. I’ve tried to do that by

talking about the part of the psychedelic experience which nobody seemed to want to talk

about – which is it seems to me that it’s not an exploration of our psychology, of our

conscious or unconscious mind. It’s a place. There’s real estate in there. It is as profound a

dimension as the new world for Columbus. We’re going to live in the world that the

psychedelic experience is revealing to us because we primarily define ourselves culturally

through language and the psychedelic experience will be found to be a revisioning of

language. Literally castles in the air await us in our global future. We are journeying deeperand deeper into the imagination. This conference that just finished this past week was

called Living in the Imagination and its focus was not strictly or at all particularly psychedelic. It

was artists, writers, film people, performers, talking about living in the imagination. I think

you could almost describe psychedelics as enzymes for the activity of the imagination. The

imagination is a sense like seeing, feeling, touching – it is more than simply an anticipation of

the future. It’s an anticipation of those things, which lie outside the forward thrust of the

momentum of probability.

The possession of the imagination is what characterizes us and distinguishes us from other

creatures. You can talk all you want about porpoises and dolphins and all of these things butyou know, they may have rich interior lives but there is no trace of epigenetic coding. In

other words, they don’t write books, paint paintings or build cathedrals. These are the things

that we do which have built up a tremendously rich environment for each succeeding

generation so that we do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our

children into the world of culture and culture is some kind of collective engineering process


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that up to this point has been largely unconscious, entirely unconscious. People just thought

what they thought and let the chips fall where they may and every once in a while a Christ,

or a Mohammad or a Buddha would come along and would reshuffle the deck and then the

game would play on.

We are coming to the place, a great turning place I would think, a cusp almost in theevolution of human psychology. It’s the self -reflection cusp. We are beginning to become

sophisticated enough with our language and our awareness to stand outside of

ourselves. What is the human enterprise? What is happening on this planet? What the hell

is going on here? This planet has supported an endless succession of animal forms. They

can be traced back into the gunflint cherts of South Africa three and a half billion years. In

the last million years, phenomena never before seen on this planet have begun to

emerge. Not all of them having to do with the human species. For instance, glaciers.

I believe and subscribe to the school in geology, which says there were not glaciers a billionyears ago or a hundred million years ago. Glaciers are a recent phenomenon having to do

with the accumulation of instability in the planetary orbit. Ice moving southward, miles high

from poles on a cycle of twenty to fifty thousand years is something entirely unique for the

biology for this planet to encounter. That process, which islands and then island’s

populations of primates and other animals and then recedes so that these intensified island

genomes then flow back into a general gene pool and then islands them again. This is like

kneading the bread of evolutionary adaptation and it’s in that world of ice moving south and

moving north that the human story begins to pickup because the human story is a story that

everyone who studies the matter believes began in Africa. It was the forming and the un-forming of the glaciers that created the cycle of wetness and dryness in Africa that placed

pressure on the evolving primates in the primary rainforest of the African tropics to begin to

develop a dry grassland or limited resource adaptation in the background of the arboreal

adaptation. Well then as the ratios of selective intensity shifted in favor of the dry land

situation, the previous mutation, which had been there all along but had not been prominent

because it was not conferring an adaptive advantage suddenly came into the fore. You get

binocular vision, bipedalism, pact signaling – all of these things which are the beginning of

the repertoire of our heritage.

Now up to this point in that story, almost all evolutionary biologists and primatologistsagree. What I’ve recently been trying to say and hope to write a book about is, I think that it

was the presence of psychedelic plants in that environment that provided the spark to begin

to call forth conscious self reflection out of this primate species. The case goes something

like this. The primates evolved; they abandoned their vegetarian lifestyle as the great forests

were reduced to grasslands. They adopted a more omnivorous lifestyle, which you see in


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most of the higher primates today. They began to hunt the large ungulate mammals that

were simultaneously evolving as the grasslands became a more dominant ecology. In the

manure of these ungulate mammals, cattle, mushrooms find their idealized

environment. Well if you’ve ever watched a baboon, the strategy of baboons for hunting

food is they go along and they pick stuff up and they smell and taste and they’re alwaysturning things over looking for bugs. Well carrion beetles and stuff like that always

congregate under cow pies.

Isn’t it wonderful that the evolution of the grandeur of the human mind begins with what’s

going on with doodlebugs under cow pies? It keeps your humility. Searching for insect

protein, the mushroom is a very conspicuous part of that kind of environment. A child of

three will run to it in the meadow because it’s neither fish nor fowl. It is quite an anomalous

and striking object. Psilocybin its been shown increases visual acuity in small doses. This is

very solid research done by Roland Fischer in the 50s and 60s, some of the last research

done with psychedelics. He showed that very small amounts of psilocybin increase visualacuity before there is any other effect. You don’t feel stoned or anything like that. The way

they proved this, they built an apparatus where there were two parallel metal bars and

someone unseen by the subject, by turning a crank could impart torsion to one of the metal

bars so that the two parallel bars would slowly…one would twist and they would cease to be

parallel. So you would get graduate students, the favorite experimental animal of

psychology, and you give them light doses of psilocybin and you sit them down in front of

this apparatus and tell them to push the buzzer when the two bars are no longer

parallel. Very consistently, the people who had been dosed with psilocybin scored higher on

this test than the people who had not.

Fischer, wishing to be facetious, said to me, ‘you see, this is a case where we’ve

experimentally proven that drugs give you a truer picture of reality than being straight.’ For

him, it was a joke. It was just this cute thing that you say to your academic colleagues but I

was quite touched and struck by…this is true what this man is saying. This is a simple

experiment and it proves that sometimes it’s better to be stoned than not stoned and your

life could be depending on it. Because hunting is an activity where visual activity is 95% of

the game and it doesn’t hurt to also have a CNS stimulant that can give you a running burst

if you need it. So since psilocybin provides both of these things, it turns you into a realkilling machine!

Fischer never considered the impacts of his findings in what this would mean in the natural

environment. But I wanted to think about it and it seemed to me that meant that those

primates including the psilocybin in their food chain would automatically have a leg up over

those that did not. They would be able to move quicker in the hunting situation and more


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accurately. Well you have to have studied evolution for ten minutes to know that that means

then that these forms are going to preserved and selected in favor of over those individuals

that do not have this in their food.

[Audience] – At the same time it could have made them a little more vulnerable.

In what way?

[Audience] – Well you eat a bunch of mushrooms and suddenly you’re just sitting there watching all these

patterns. You’re more vulnerable to predators.

Yes, well that’s what I wanted to get to. I don’t mean full trips. I mean that in the process

of eating bugs and roots and stuff, if they ate these mushrooms without even knowing they

were psychoactive, they would have this visual acuity. Now somebody at some point at a lot

of them and they discovered that they were no good for hunting or bursts of speed or

anything – they just wanted to lie on the ground and be with it. At that point, I think thisbecomes a mystery for the first human beings. The cow is the source of food, fuel, body

covering, milk and an image of nurturing that’s very important because the birthing of the

cow – it probably was the birthing of cattle and the observation of cattle probably taught

people more about sex than their own sexuality did. The husbanding of animals is how farm

children learn about life. I don’t know.

This all relates to the theme of light in nature because there is a great mystery on this

planet. We are only one side of the coin of that mystery. Our existence here should be the

clue to us that something really weird is going on. I don’t think most planets are like this

planet. I can stretch out to the idea that there are many planets with life but I think the level

of complexity, the presence of a historical civilization which is just going to exist for a

geological microsecond, we are very, very close to the people we came out of 50,000 years

ago. Yet, look at how we have changed the world. Who is whispering to us in our

dreams? Whose hand is it that we feel guiding our destiny into the future? We’re so

accustomed to be rational and reductionist – the ‘there ain’t nothing really going on here at

all’ school of thought that we’re just deadened to the mysteriousness of our own

presence. If we’re here, who knows what else could be here in the mountains, jungles and

deserts of this planet. We have not yet even carried out a complete cataloguing of

nature. We don’t really know what kind of a foundation we’re standing on and then when

you take the psychedelics, which come out of the natural world, the message that they’re

bearing in the broadest sweep is that our historically created, symbolic model of reality is

almost worthless.

I mean it’s OK for dealing bread and trading donkeys but once y ou get into anything deeper

than that, it’s just a story we tell ourselves; a magic charm that we rattle against the


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darkness. The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us except when we

put our mind into the socket of nature and then we connect up to something so bizarre that

we can barely recognize it. Something lying so far outside our previous symbolic structures

that we don’t know whether it’s an alien invasion, the eminence of Christ’s immediate return,

the rise of Atlantis or just what it is. It is confounding, that’s the main thing aboutpsychedelics. That’s why it seems to me, it divides people. It’s for people who like the

bizarre, the weird, the unthinkable, the unspeakable, the peculiar, the edge of meaning,

beauty at its most Baroque and the world of Hieronymus Bosch and Peter Brueghel the

Elder and some people don’t like that. They like to be reassured. They like closure. They

love being ensconced in concentric circles of expectation and tradition and solidity – that

sort of thing. This just gives them the heebeegeebees, this kind of stuff. Because we’re

saying the intellectual world has an edge and if you go over that edge, you will find the

unanticipated tremendum.

[Audience] - Maybe it doesn’t matter if plants are te achers and people are teachers too. How it gotthere? It’s a great question but I see it more as a way into a doorway somewhere that’s real and that’s the

point.

Well maybe there’s a planetary regulating system and people are simply cells in a larger

organism and when it comes time for something to happen, which maybe means all life

leaves the planet or something, then the equivalent of hormones are produced in the

environment to initiate this morphogenetic re-scripting of what is going on. Suddenly

animals, which were perfectly happy, hunting on the veldts of Africa, begin making art,

watching the stars and moving into history for the purpose of saving the planet.

I really like to think that we are biologically regulated and that history is a biological

phenomenon under the control of the environment. It isn’t something that is going against

the environment. Now the objection to that is that it looks so bad, it looks cancerous. But

the obvious counter to that is birth – I mean birth – there’s a lot of bloodshed, people make

sounds as though they were in great pain, they are in great pain, it has all the attributes that

we associate with violent, violent termination of the organism and yet it is the precise

opposite. It is the birthing of the new generation and it is unavoidable and it is perfectly

natural.

Well as a woman grows pregnant and she loses her self like form and becomes heavier and

all these things, the changes that go on in pregnancy – maybe something that has happened

to the Earth over the past 20,000 years. The Earth is pregnant with humanity and perhaps

much else and obviously you just look at the Earth and humanity and these two can’t stay

together much longer. They’re becoming a problem. The mother can’t function, the child is

in danger and like the birth situation, if the child is not eventually birthed, toxemia will set in


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then everything goes haywire. Then both parties are in danger and there has to be

emergency intervention and so forth. I don’t think we’ve really reached that point yet but I

think we’ve come to term.

As you know concerning birth, transition is the psychedelic compression of where it all

comes together and it seems like it is impossible and overwhelming and is going on foreverand then it ends. Then the baby is born and everything is seen to be all right. Well I think

the 20th century; it’s not a metaphor that we are birthing the new soul of humanity. It’s

actually happening and it’s ripping our society and our planet to pieces. What will come out

of it is the meaning of our destiny, perhaps the meaning of the planetary destiny. And I

hope we’re going to be privileged to be midwives of this process, to be there on the that

great day when it all makes sense and then you can turn and look back at the process; the

wars and revolutions and pogroms and migrations and the whole thing and say, now I

understand what all that was about.

That’s I think the real promise of getting with nature through the psychedelics – being in on

that process. Because if you’re in on that process, anxiety will leave you. You will not define

yourself as a victim; you will define yourself as a privileged spectator.

[Audience] - Have you thought about this outside and inside dichotomy?

But I wonder Clive. Thinking about the question – is it inside or outside? It seems to me

more that what you have is a loosely coupled hierarchy where there are elements of freedom

and self will at every level of the hierarchy but always constrained by deterministic factors

that are also at every level. So sort of the new model, which I think is coming, is that theEarth is an organism. Yes that’s well established but human history is a part of that

organism. It’s as different from the rest of it as the brain is from the liver but that human

history is not somehow against the planet or unexpected or unwelcome – that it’s actually

part of the control system. Yet it is controlled and this is where I think we need to revision

what drugs are.

All of human history is the sculpting of human populations by their relationships to

plants. Think of the effect that sugar had on the rise of mercantilism and empire building, or

opium policy on the Far East, or the spread of rye, the replacing of wheat by rye in the

Middle East - as you move north and how that made certain types of populations and

migrations possible. You could write a book about human history in which you analyze the

entire phenomenon as movement toward equilibrium in response to states of disequilibrium

introduced by plants, by foods, by spices, by drugs, by psychedelics, by addicting drugs. So

that’s how in our own bodies, a given system is regulated – through the release of hormones


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which turn on certain genes and turn off certain other genes and turn on certain secretions

and turn off others.

I think we assume that human history has just been something dreamed up by egomaniacal

males, each one building on the accomplishments of the other. But it may be that it’s

actually always been regulated as a process by the planetary control system by regulatingdiet. The diet of every species and in particularly this one, determines its energy levels, its

intellectual preoccupations, its migratory patterns, its distribution of work and labor and this

sort of thing. Maybe this is over answering your question, but it’s not a dualism. It’s not

one or the other, whether you see the control and the information from the drug coming

from within you or without you is really a matter of perspective where you choose to

describe it from. Intrinsically it doesn’t seem to be possible to know that. We’re like cells

moving at the will of a larger system.

Somebody once said, ‘electrons blindly run’ and Alfred North Whitehead said, ‘yes but insidethe body they blindly run according to the body’s plan.’ I think that’s what you might say

about people. People blindly run but without realizing it, they run according to Gaia’s plan.

[Audience] - I personally have experimented with a whole number of psychedelics and I must say that I never

found that one psychedelic gives you a certain kind of vision and another gives another. I’ve always found it

has to do with where I was at; a lot of other things. The key to me, all psychedelics are really keys. They

open up that reducing belt that Huxley talks about and once that’s open – whatever comes in, comes in. For

me it has nothing to do with the psychedelic itself.

[Audience 2] – I keep hearing this word, like expire – I felt like I might die. Possibly one of you would liketo address the relative non-toxicity of mushrooms.

Well you see it’s a funny thing. Now we’re talking about life and death and when we need

reassurance in that realm, we immediately turn to science and talk about the LD50. For

those of you who don’t know, lethal dose 50 - so pharmacologists are asking of a given drug,

what is its LD50? That means how much of it had to be given to a hundred rats for fifty of

them to die. LD50s are considered a relative measure of the safety of a drug. The LD50 for

psilocybin is huge. Something like 200 mg per kg of body weight. So that means to kill

yourself with mushrooms, you would have to eat four and a half dried pounds or something

like that.

[Audience] – That’s what I wanted to emphasis. One of the basic fears that one may experience at a

threshold dose….

Discorporation?


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[Audience] – That is, if you can grasp the fact that you’re must worse off drinking a couple of cups of coffee

generally, that can alleviate some of that particular fear. You might sa y, it’s not going to poison me; I just

need to keep breathing.

Well a funny thing about this thinking your going to die. If you tell a straight person this,

they say ‘well psychedelic drugs, isn’t that the bit? You take it and you think you’re going to

die and you don’t and you’re so damn glad you didn’t, your ecstatic.’

[Audience] – I’ve never taken ayahuasca and am wondering, since what I understand, DMT is the effective

compound? When you’ve taken that do you find that its characteristic is similar to pure DMT or is it very

different than that?

No it’s a lot like DMT in the center of the flash but DMT unfolds over a minute or two and

lasts three or four minutes. Ayahuasca is more like mushrooms, it comes on about the hour

and twenty-minute mark and it comes in waves. But when you really get it and you’re

looking at it, you say yes – this looks just exactly like DMT. I suppose we should explain for

people who aren’t familiar with it. DMT, if you were to eat it, would be destroyed in your

gut by monoamine oxidase. So the strategy in the Amazon is to take a plant with DMT in it

and a plant with monoamine oxidase inhibitors in it and combine the two into a beverage

that can then be drunk and then the DMT passes through to the brain. One of the great

mysteries of ethnopharmacology in the Amazon is how they ever figured this out. We’re

talking about hundreds of thousands of species of plants and in this case it’s the leaves of

one boiled with the pulpy main body of another – placed together in a certain proportion

and then the thing works. When you ask them how is this done they say, the plants have

told us. This seems like a more likely explanation than anything anybody has been able to

come up with.

Some of you may know this book called Rio Tigre and Beyond , where this guy who had learned

to make ayahuasca when he was kidnapped as a child by a deep forest tribe. When he then

in later life becomes a rosewood and curare collector, he meets people in the jungle who are

extremely – what do I want to say – living in the natural state. Uncontacted people. But

when he takes their ayahuasca, he realizes that it’s garbage. They don’t know how to make

it. Then he makes it for them and shows them how to make it and they’re just knocked off

their feet and hail him as a cultural reformer. So it’s not always simply a matter of theuncontacted, so called primitive people have the skinny. It’s a technology.

Something I want to say before we leave this. If you think about natural drug complexes

around the world, the interesting thing to notice about ayahuasca is unlike peyote or

mushrooms or the Iboga cults of Africa or the morning glory cults of central Mexico or

cannabis. Different from all of these is the fact that it’s a combinatory preparation and in


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practical terms, what that suddenly means is a person is involved. The person who makes

it. For the first time we’re getting a chemist into the picture – an alchemist, a teacher if you

want – because ayahuasca unlike mushrooms and all these other things, is only as good as

the person who made it. Where mushrooms, you don’t have to worry about that in quite the

same way. A mushroom is ready to go when it comes out of the ground. The ayahuasca is acombinatory drug and so it brings the human interaction and the lore of it into a much more

central position.

This is something to bear in mind if you’re thinking of going to the Amazon to take

ayahuasca. You’re going to have a people experience because the only way to it is through

people. You could have a mushroom experience in Mexico by simply finding the

mushroom, you know?


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Suggested Reading List

At each of these weekends we usually update people on books on the subject that are

available. One of the things that people don’t do enough of when they do psychedelic workis spend time in the library. There’s a great deal of published literature on these things -

historical, chemical, so forth and so on. It’s good to be informed. I know that I often use

reference books; I use Schultes’ The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens for those

aspects. Peter Stafford’s Psychedelic Encyclopedia is good for a sort of social history

overview. Marlene De Rios has a book called Hallucinogens: Cross-Cultural

Perspectives . Probably one of the books that I recommend most to people is Michael Harner’s

anthology Shamanism and Hallucinogens , where he gathered a bunch of very good articles

together there. Hoffer and Osmond’s old classic The Hallucinogens, even though it was last

updated in 1968 is still, on the major hallucinogens, the best source. And in addition tothose, which I just mentioned but don’t have here to show you, I want to show you some of

the newer or more interesting stuff in the field.

This is a book that has not been widely distributed at all. This fellow might be a candidate

for teaching at Esalen, I don’t know. It’s The Science and Romance of Selected Herbs Used in

Medicine and Religious Ceremony by Anthony Andoh. Andoh has his own institute in San

Francisco; he runs a nursery on Taraval. Judging by this book, he’s an extremely

knowledgeable person with a worldwide education in herbs and a special stress on folk

usage. So there are for instance, here’s an Egyptian illustration of Sennefer, the royal garden

and his gardener and his sister Merit. There’s a lot of plant lore in here that you just don’t

get anywhere else and another book like that is William Emboden’s book Narcotic

Plants . Terrible title but a tremendous amount of information that doesn’t seem to appear

anywhere else. Macmillan is the publisher. So he’s a Bay area resource that we certainly were

not aware of until very recently and maybe some of the rest of you were not aware of him

either. This guy is one of us. He should be part of the party.

Then in terms of publications, the publications on psychedelics that you may be familiar

with, such as High Times and High Frontiers are sort of addressing this, trying to restart the

youth rebellion. Anyway, it’s not a full spectrum or deep look at psychedelics.

This magazine, which was previously called Psychozoic Press and has been renamed Psychedelic

Monographs and Essays . Are you a psychedelic monograph, Eric? Oh you’re an essay?

[Audience Laughter]


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It’s published out of Florida and it’s very, very lively. It has a huge letter section. Everybody

you know seems to write one letter per issue in and for instance, this issue has articles on

psychedelics, a woman’s rite of passage and earmarks of psychedelic spiritual experiences,

also by a woman. Psychedelics and lucid dreaming, door ways in the mind, also by a woman,

and Thomas Riedlinger who some of you may know from Chicago, an article by him onpsychedelic schooling. This is simply printed but it’s from the heart, it’s scholarly; the tone I

think is very good. I would actually urge you to support these people by subscribing. We

have nothing personally to do with it; it’s just that they’re on a good trip. I’ll hand this

around and you can get addresses off of them if you want.

This is Rupert’s new book. Rupert is Rupert Sheldrake. It’s just begun to be

distributed. He is going to make a revolution in thinking about resonance and form and it

has an aspect in it that is very kind to our concerns. The psychedelics are much more

centrally important to understanding in a morphic resonance theory of nature. So Rupert is

just a brilliant writer, even more brilliant than he is a talker and this is a delicious book to justread ten or fifteen pages at night before you go to bed.

This is a reference book that in terms of getting a lot of information between the covers of

one book with a massive amount of color illustration - this is Richard Evan Schultes, the

leading light of Ethnobotany. He spent over fifteen years in the Amazon and has lead

hundreds of graduate students into careers into Ethnobotany and really has put the field on

the map and his co-author is Albert Hoffman who invented LSD. In terms of one book

about psychoactive plants that is in print and readily available, I would go with this one I

think.

[Audience] – Alfred Van Der Mark?

Van Der Mark did this edition. It was originally done by Macmillan. This is Riane Eisler’s

book, The Chalice and the Blade . It may not immediately appear to have anything to do with

psychedelics but it has to do with re-visioning society by looking at ancient models of how

men and women arranged social structure in the past. Like Rupert, this is a book with a

secret agenda. This book is a tracking horse for a new respectability for psychedelics

because when you begin asking the question, why was there a partnership society for so long

and why did it give way to a dominator culture, the answer lies, I think, in changing patternsof plant utilization in a changing relationship to the psychedelic experience. This is a

wonderful book; maybe the most important book for archeological scholarship in the last

ten years or so. Riane lives in Carmel Valley. She is a local person and a great resource and

I’m sure that you’ll be seeing more of her in the Esalen catalogue and around. She speaks

very well if you have a chance to hear her speak, I would urge you to do it.


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This is just to remind you of our little book on cultivating mushrooms. If you have the time

and the focus, this is really the way to do it shamanically - to get out of the ‘dealing’ cycle

and the ‘not knowing what you’ve got’ cycle. Also, as I’ve said earlier, this trains you to

punctuality, cleanliness, attention to detail - all of these qualities which I used to say to

people once you’ve grown the mushroom, you know you’re ready to take it because it hasimbued in you the qualities you need to take it through the act of growing it. Don’t be

fooled, it isn’t easy and it isn’t that the process is difficult. It’s that you have bad habits that

will get in the way of the process. Habits like leaving your apartment occasionally. You

can’t do that any more if you do this….

It’s definitely much more than a grower’s guide. It contains a lot of, as Kat mentioned, a

chronology and a lot of discussion about what the mushroom is. It also is the first place

where these images from the African Plateau, the Tassili Plateau in Algeria, has been

reproduced from and they are strong evidence for the use of mushrooms in Neolithic

Africa. This is evidence, which Wasson did not include in his books; new evidence and bothof the major rock paintings that argue for this point of view are in here. The next issue of

revision will have a drawing by Kat on the cover and an article by me about mushrooms and

the goddess. It will be a psychedelic issue. Everything in it will be psychedelic so you might

watch for that.

Then last and just sort of as a fun thing, in case you’re not aware of this book, some people

aren’t. It’s called the Codex Seraphinianus and it is written in an unknown language. It

contains hundreds and hundreds of color drawings and since it’s written in an unknown

language, it’s impossible to figure out what it’s about because the drawings are all of objectsthat don’t exist in this world. So it’s great fun, it’s stimulation for the imagination. It shows

I think one person’s response to the psychedelic experience. This book was originally

published at $75.00. It’s obviously a labor of love. It could not have been conceived of as a

money making proposition. Consequently now it’s being remained in most places. You can

pick one of these up for $19 bucks, at least at Moe’s in Berkeley and probably any other large

volume bookstore like that. You can spend hours with this thing. It’s more than you can

take in at one go.

Well, I thought this morning because we don’t have too much time and I have had several

people ask me to talk about our personal visions and some people specifically, the Time Wave and all that. I’ll sort of work my way into it. I did want to take a count of the fact that

today is Easter. There are workshops that would have fallen upon the coincidence of Easter

with themselves as an excuse for an orgy of oval ceremonialism but somehow it slipped past

here. It’s an excellent excuse for me to talk about what seems to me one of the most


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mysterious of all passages in the New Testament. I’m not a New Testament scholar but I’ve

puzzled over this passage for years and years and I think it relates to what we’re doing.

I’m not sure, I believe it’s in Matthew when the woman come to the tomb on Easter

morning looking for Christ – now I think it’s Mary Magdalene who comes first and she’s

alone I believe – and Christ is there, she sees him. It is the two Margarets who comelater. She starts toward Christ because she thought he was dead and she sees him standing

by the tomb. She starts towards him and he stops her and he says ‘touch me not, for I am

not yet completely of the nature of the Father.’ I’ve always thought that this was just a

fascinating passage because what is being said here? What’s going on here? Christ seems to

be indicating that though he is now alive, he has resurrected, he has come through the

crucifixion, nevertheless in some sense he is not yet completely transubstantiate and it

suggests a process, a physical change in the body that requires time to complete itself.

So this morning I thought I would talk a little bit about time and insights into it that havecome to me out of psychedelics. What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging

was to bring back something. I always felt and still feel that that is the attitude with which

you should go into these things – to bring something back. I mean it could be something –

a personal insight into a personal dilemma or a more generalized idea. Because I really think

that the psychedelic realm is the realm of ideas and that ideas which change the world come

first from that place. I’m always a little reluctant to get into this because when I speak about

my own ideas, I feel much more of how much I’m asking from you as an audience. In other

words, it’s like an ego trip because it’s my ideas and why spend an hour on my idea instead

of talking about all these facts, careers and established concerns? But you asked for it so…

In 1971, when we went to the Amazon to look into DMT and all of these things, we really

had no clear conception of what we were after. We just knew that we wanted to get more

time in that dimension, more hands on experience. Well if any of you have read the Invisible

Landscape , you know that my brother conceived of a certain kind of project where he thought

that the psychedelic molecules could actually be bonded in to the physical body, into the

DNA using sound and that they could be made briefly superconducting and it’s interesting

that that was a word that no one knew what it meant back then. He predicted room

temperature superconductors in 1971 at La Chorrera. Well now room temperature

superconductors are a huge concern of a vast part of the scientific research establishment. A whole new technology is promised by this stuff.

He has this notion that you could bond psychedelic molecules into the DNA and that then

the trip would sustain itself indefinitely and could be analyzed as a kind of waveform

signature of the totality of the organism. In other words, he felt the ordinary psychedelic

trip is a fleeting photograph, an almost X-ray you could say that comes into the mind when


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the psychedelic molecules occupy these bond sites and then flash to the higher cortical

processing area of the brain, a kind of gestalt of the state of the organism. And he felt that if

you could stabilize and permanentize this that it would be worth doing. I mean, it wasn’t

clear if he thought he would become a Taoist sage or turn into a flying saucer or what it

was. It was a shifting image of totality that he was projecting. Well I was very skeptical of this because it seems unreasonable and basically I’m a reasonable

person. But on the other hand, going to the center of the Amazon basin had been our

purpose and here we were now somebody seemed to be coming up with something very

interesting so we let the experiment run since it seemed to me it would either work as he said

it would work or it would fail utterly. Because what was proposed was that you saturate your

body with psychedelic molecules then sing in a certain range and in a certain way. I thought

either nothing will happen, 99 chances out of a 100, or since he’s so impassionedly

convinced something will happen, the thing he is convinced will happen, will happen. So we

performed this experiment and if you’ve listened toTrue Hallucinations , you know what a riotit was and what chaos it set off. I won’t really review that except for those who didn’t

read True Hallucinations : what he said would happen didn’t happen but my expectation that

nothing would happen was completely frustrated and instead he seemed to initiate what at

first brush looked like a psychotic break. He became unaware of the people around

him. He would talk right through other people’s talking as though he couldn’t hear

them. He began to make less and less sense. He lost motor control and everyone assumed

that he was slipping into some kind of psychosis.

What complicated this was I, who had been cast in the role of skeptic and the witness, hadnoticed that the moment he had forged the joint (as he called it), something began to happen

for me. Something very unusual. What it was, was the teaching voice familiar from

psilocybin experiences but with none of the ambiguity and difficulty of connection that I had

associated with the psilocybin experiences. Instead it just came on and appeared to be

locked in place and he was saying, that’s it, we’ve succeeded. This is what it is. I wasn’t even

on mushrooms. He had taken ayahuasca. There were no hallucinations. There was no

feeling of being stimulated or depressed – there was nothing but this voice and it was talking

at such a speed that I would walk these jungle trails like this: uh-huh, uh-huh, yes, yes,

yes! At that speed, not for minutes but for months, you know? What it was concerned to convey is what I now call the Time Wave and I will attempt,

without blackboards or mathematics or being boring I hope, to explain what this is. That is a

formidable problem because this is an idea as rigid as the kind of ideas that run subway

trains and send submarines back to their bases. It’s a formal, tight idea. But the way it was

taught to me was in a steady process of self-amplifying parables or teachings you could


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almost say. So how it began was it said to me: have you noticed that everyday is like every

other day, somewhat? I said, y es I’ve noticed that. It said, ‘have you noticed that every week

is like more or less, like every other week. Yes, I said. It said: ‘well did you know’ – and this

is a typical mushroom construction – ‘did you know, I’ll bet you did know’ (and then the

w hammy) ‘that every day has a relationship to four other days. They are not the four dayspreceding it, they are scattered back through time. One of them may be six months in the

past, one of them may be thousands of years in the past but each day is actually an

interference pattern caused by the coming together of the resonances of other times. ‘

So it never occurred to me. It never occurred to me that that was a possibility. So then it

said, ‘go get your I-Ching’ and I went and got my I-Ching and it said ‘we’re going to look at

the first order of difference.’ I said, ‘what’s the first order of difference?’ It said, ‘oh, you

don’t know that the first order of difference is? The first order of difference is how many

lines change as you go from one hexagram to another.’

Now, I don’t know how many of you are familiar with I-Ching but I assume most

somewhat. The I-Ching is composed of structures, which have six levels called

hexagrams. They are either broken or unbroken lines. The first one, called the creative, is

all solid lines. The second one, called the receptive, is all broken lines. Who can tell me the

first order of difference between the first and second hexagram? Here’s a clue, it’s the

number of lines that break.

[Audience Silence]

It’s six. I don’t know why you’re not leaping forward with this. It makes me wonder howfar we can go. Anyway, to try and shorten this story, what this teaching voice was concerned

with was structure in the I-Ching, a previously hidden structure. So it said, ‘we can’t go

forward with this conversation until you get some graph paper because this is going to be

not only conversation. This is going to be diagram.’ So I got graph paper and it said, ‘draw

the hexagrams in a descending line in the King Wen sequence and then make a graph of the

first order of difference – the number of lines that change as you go from hexagram to

hexagram.’ I did this and got a wavy line obviously.

You can tell that the values will lie between one and six. In some cases six will change, in

some cases only one. Never zero because each hexagram is different. I was puzzled as to

why an Amazonian mushroom wanted to talk about the archeology of ancient China. And

so what? This resonance calendar existed but then it said, ‘no, no, you don’t

understand. We are now in the atrium of what it is I want to reveal to you. I want you to go

back and look at the first order of difference wave and I want you to understand that!’ I

already knew this but I hadn’t done much with it. The reason the I-Ching is based on 64 is


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because 64 are the number of codons that DNA runs on. The I-Ching is not an arbitrary

construction. It is something that comes out of the deep, formal inspection of what the

human organism is. The human organism is a molecular machine that runs on an iterative

program of 64. The proteins that compose our bodies are like this, so forth and so on.

I said, ‘well, I understand about DNA, I understand how the I-Ching mirrors that but I

don’t understand how then it’s also a calendar’ and the voice said, ‘well don’t you see –

perception can be only organized out of the matter which composes it. Time appears to you

in your psychological perception of it in the way that it does because time is a property of

matter that is being amplified by biology into the theater of awareness.’ So in other words

and this is now me speaking, not it. My interpretation of what it was saying was, life is a

phenomenon of quantum mechanical amplification and because we’re organized on the

blueprint of this quantum mechanical pattern that is very deep at the sub molecular level of

matter, then all our institutions, languages, religions, love affairs – everything has this pattern

as the base embedded in it, almost like these fractals which give rise to endless amounts of acertain kind of beauty but if you were to see the equation which generates the fractal, it has

six terms. It can be written in fifteen seconds.

So then years passed and a great leap had to be made because I was non-functional. Because

I worked with this wave, I felt I had the signature of the universe, that a great gift of truth

had been given to me but when I tried to tell people, they just backed to the wall and said,

‘you know, get help now!’ ‘Now get help!’

Here’s where we separate the men from the boys, the women from the girls, and the wheat

from the chafe. The conclusion that I reached was that this universal wave, which has been

operating for several billion years, will reach its maximum concrescent state of enfoldment at

dawn on the 22nd of December 2012 AD. This immediately puts me in the nut

category. This is what’s called messianic delusion. Millenarian grandeur, so forth and so

on. Nevertheless it’s a persistent intuition of most religious ontologies. Perhaps not the

Buddhist, but the Hindus, the Jews, the Muslims, the Christians, all appoint an end to their

world. I’m a little shy about this because it’s so personally mine. Nobody has ever made a

contribution to this idea that was substantial. It’s seems to be mine alone and welcome to it

and yet, I want you and historians, paleontologists and primatologists, and people who are

experts on time in different sizes to look at this wave. It’s working ladies and gentlemen. Itdoes in fact describe the ebb and flow of this thing called novelty.

Now when I questioned the mushroom about this, it almost makes it trivial. For it, it’s an

‘of course.’ Of course you are made of DNA, DNA is made out of matter, matter has to

have time as a precondition of its existence. The signature of time embedded in the atomic

structure is amplified to the molecular structure, then is amplified to the organismic structure


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– and that’s called a human life well lived, then it’s amplified to the societal structure – that’s

called the birth, growth and senescence of empire. Then it’s magnified to the global

structure and that’s called the coming of the hyperspacial object at the end of time. It’s also

a theory of resonance. It’s saying that large scales of time have their themes and concerns

condensed and revivified in the smaller components. Now this is somewhat hard tounderstand but rich enough to pursue. It’s this idea.

Now I’m going to use James Joyce’s classic example. Joyce wrote a book

calledUlysses . Ulysses is a book about a man who rises on a morning, a bright morning day in

June in 1905 or 1906; he wants to fry some kidneys for breakfast so he gets his wallet and

heads out into Dublin to score some kidneys to bring back and he has all these

adventures. Joyce understood that this man on this day was also Ulysses with his brave

component of men journeying to the end of the Mediterranean laying siege to Troy for nine

years, winning the Trojan War and returning their homelands. In other words, he

understood that in each of us, we are acting out larger and larger scales of time that givecolor and precision and depth and interest to our being. So if you find yourself on a

Saturday night in a place in San Francisco called Hadrian’s Hamburger Joint, it has

something to do with the emperor Hadrian and his conquest of Britain and his effort to hold

back the barbarians. Life carefully examined is actually a form of allegorical literature with a

very tight constructional grid laid over it.

This is a rich idea and as I’ve said, I’ll be giving a five day workshop on this only because this

is the only psychedelic idea I’ve ever brought back other than idiotic realizations such as –

‘everyone’s little finger precisely fits their nostril.’ You know – there’s no market forthat. But this, this would actually create a re-visioning of time and had we more time this

morning, I would tell you how it could be turned into a calendar of the Goddess. How by

living with a solar year, that always puts Christmas with the same slant of sunshine coming

in, that we have locked ourselves into a paternalistic, masculine dominated structure.

What the universe is, is flux. Nothing lasts. Nothing abides. Everything moves

on. Women know this. Men don’t and we’re living under a solar masculine calendar. The

reason that our ideas and by our ideas I’m now speaking of the entirety of the new age and

all of this stuff – the reason our ideas meet resistance is because the framing around the

entire discussion of the spirit and feminism and transformation, the frame is always themasculine solar time frame. As long as we operate under that calendar, we will have a very

difficult time advancing ideas. The Chinese understood this. This was why when great

reforming emperors arose, the first thing they did was change the calendar. If you want

food for thought, look at hexagram 49. It’s revolution. You open it up expecting sage


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political advice; it talks only about the calendar and it talks about the magician as a calendar

maker. In fact it says the magician is a calendar maker.

So I think that what this teaching that came out of this experience in the Amazon was all

about was, it was a totality symbol. Dennis had thought that the flying saucer would emerge

out of his body as a spinning violent disk of translinguistic matter that would become ashowerhead, pizza or Mercedes, depending on what you needed at the moment. He thought

it would become matter in the act of appropriate activity. Instead what emerged was a

totality symbol. Jung talks about how any individuation process, you always hope that the

patient or the client will generate a totality symbol but he usually means a kind of individual

and wavering totality symbol like a mandala or a cohesive structure or something. I think we

got, and I try to say this without hubris because I felt like I was nothing more than the vessel

into which this thing was being poured – what we got was the totality symbol in a complete

version, certainly not a totality version because I don’t think the human mind can encompass

the total version, but we got a skeletal blueprint of what totality is in the world.

What it is, is knowing how things happen. Knowing that all processes, the firing of a nerve,

the culmination of a love affair, the fall of an empire – has a pattern. And if you know the

pattern, you will be at ease with any process in all or any of its stages. Because you say, ‘ah

this is the time of resistance. It will soon be followed by the time of foreword motion. That

will be followed by the time of re-enfoldment.’ What this does is – it eliminates anxiety

ultimately. That’s the bottom line. Our anxiety about death and our anxiety about the

future and our relationships and money – all this stuff can be boiled down to anxiety about

the unknowable aspects of the future. If we could assimilate a model like this we would be Taoists. The future holds no terrors for a person who knows how process inevitably

unfolds. They are always right and with it in each moment.

So I think that we’ve always talked about the I-Ching and Taoism as short for the

culmination of mysticism but to make it a living faith in our own lives, there should be

nothing mystical about it. I maintain to you, there is nothing mystical about it. It’s simply

that we are at such a primitive stag e of culture that we haven’t yet understood what time

is. A hundred years ago we were at such a primitive stage at culture that we didn’t

understand what time was. Einstein had to come along and say, time is not an abstraction

necessary to have a place to put objects that you want to examine. Time itself is anobject. It is curved in the vicinity of massive gravitational fields. It has a topology. It has a

surface. I think what we need to understand out of this idea, ultimately what the psychedelic

experience is teaching, ultimately what Taoism is trying to say – is time is a topological

manifold. It is a surface. Events flow across it like water over land and like water flowing

over land, when the land is flat; the water becomes reflective and moves slowly. When the


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landscape becomes disrupted, the water moves faster and chaotic attractors appear and new

kinds of activity emerge and out of that new activity, there comes the new states that define

the future.

Well, I’m going to stop there. I haven’t shown you a graph or written a number or drawn a

hexagram and I think that’s remarkable. This is the feeling the feeling tone; this is the goodstuff that you get if you go through those graphs, numbers and time on at the

computer. But this is the totality symbol that I was able to get out of living a psychedelic life

and I believe that there are as many of these kinds of totality symbols as there are people

willing to trip. Each one of them is different. We create them for each other, they complete

our lives, they assuage anxiety and they give us a tremendous appetite then for the adventure

of being rather than the ordeal of being. They arise out of using psychedelics to amplify and

inspect the quantum mechanical and subconscious and superconscious portions of the

human mind. This is why the psychedelic experience and psychedelics are so important. It’s

because they are tools for understanding and re-visioning the reality in which we alllive. The personal growth is a wonderful thing and will naturally follow along but it’s more

important than that. It’s a way to make a new world that is Taoistic, feminine, free of

anxiety and in great anticipation of further stages of completion laying into the

future. That’s where the mystery, the transcendental object, the pot of gold at the end of

rainbow is waiting and I think that’s the job of each of us – to show our best toys and our

best tricks that lift us and our friends to higher and higher levels. There is no end to this

bootstrapping process. The future of the human mind and body and the future of humans

together is endlessly bright.

Keep the faith! Recognize each other and maybe I should close with a little line from Gary

Snyder if I can remember it. He said, ‘learn the flowers, travel light and stay together.’


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The Evolution of a Psychedelic Thinker

The way I got into all of this and it seems to me it’s worth talking about because psychedelic,

the word has in a sense been too narrow. It’s a kind of secret faith having to do withperception of the world I think. I feel that I was psychedelic long before I knew anything

about psychedelics because what I was interested in as a child was nature and complexity but

not simply nature and complexity but a certain visual suggestiveness of mystery. So I was a

beetle collector and a butterfly collector and it was this pursuit of iridescence was actually

what it was. Then years later when I studied psychology and the brain, I

read Sherrington’s definition of consciousness as an iridescence upon matter, meaning an effect

that when you shift the point of regarding slightly the iridescence disappears. It’s hard to

even explain to myself let alone to a room full of people how much I cared about this sort of

thing. How is it possible for a nine-year child to hold the image of one insect continuouslyin their mind for months as in almost a mystical epiphany because of how it looks;

something about how it looks?

Then as I broadened my interest as a pre-adolescent child I got into science fiction. As I

look back on it now, I see it was simply that it broke down barriers - conceptual barriers

about what was possible and it was setting me up for this position vis-à-vis the input of the

world, which was that I would entertain any idea but believe in nothing. We’re actually

trying to talk about a psychedelic canon; this is a very central part of the psychedelic attitude

toward the world. To entertain all possibilities but to never commit to belief; belief always

being seen as a kind of trap because if you believe something, you’re forever precluded from

believing its opposite. So you have run a line down the center of the cognitive universe and

divide things into the believable and the unbelievable. You know how a child lives in fantasy

and how fantasy then gives way and gave way in my case to science fiction. This is a kind of

pre-psychedelic mindset that many, many people of my generation were experiencing as they

came up through the Eisenhower years, which were spiritually a complete desert, but in this

pulp magazines beneath the surface of consciousness.

Notice throughout this month, how much of what is important to what we’re talking about

goes on in the non-sanctioned corners of the culture. Pulp Literature, cults, un-sanctionedgatherings of friends, Rock & Roll - all of these areas where the emotional content of the

culture is allowed to come to rest are somewhat off limits. Into adolescence, this cognition

breaking iridescence-pursuing thing came directly up against Eros, which was a complete

new dimension for the goggle-eyed terror of the science fairs to be plunged into, which was

myself. Women, sexuality, social signaling, intense emotion; all of this and everyone

experiences this. In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very


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few people manage to evade because we may like to think we are rational animals but for

purposes of biology, a whole set a completely irrational programs have been built in that just

can take a professor Indo-European grammar and turn him into a haunted figure pursuing

chorus girls or any of the other 50,000 variations on that theme. So Eros is an ego

overwhelming, boundary dissolving, breakthrough creating force scripted into human lifethat is pretty intrinsically psychedelic. I don’t really understand how all this works at all but

when you get very deep in, especially on some of these tryptamines, you brush up against

some kind of – it’s hard to even put words to it – but it’s erotic. It’s a potential within the

concept of Eros that is almost too much to bear and almost seems to imply that what we call

erotic sensibility is a kind of lower dimensional slice of some higher dimensional reality that

our feelings are trying to carry us into.

This is sort of an aside on that but one of the interesting things about psychedelics and I

now speak of the compounds themselves, especially the plants, they have a certain

fascination with where the genes go and will pair people across great lines ofimprobability. In other words, it’s almost as thoug h the biological control, which is exerted

on this mammalian species by the mushroom is actually at the materialistic level a control of

who has children by whom, which means the control of the evolution of gene lines. I

maintain this is why the place most people feel magic in their own lives, even the most

humdrum people feel magic in their lives, is in the matter of mate selection. I was just down

in the baths and heard a story this morning where a man said he had a happy marriage for

seven years. It was perfect and he ran some kind of a company and one day he got a

telephone call. Someone wanted to sell him a new line of nails and he knew when he heard

the voice on the other end that his marriage was ruined and that he would follow this voiceand possess this woman and so forth and so on. Which he had done for better or for

worse. Well, this kind of thing where the most staid lives can be skewed off in other

directions is – in the old style of talking about it – it’s an eruption of the

unconscious. Where psychedelics are involved, it seems to be more of a winnowing of the

genes. So sex obviously has this deep, complex multi-meaning kind of feel about it that

pretty much the rest of reality for most people doesn’t.

The next step in my own evolution and I feel like I’m simply the fortunate beneficiary of a

series of random events, which were very fortuitous from my own point of view. In other words, without having a whole lot of sense and with very little foresight, I very fortunately

found myself in a lot of right places in a lot of right times. The place I went after

ado

Podcasts From the Psychedelic Salon [Terence McKenna] (Part 2)

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