I started out my academic career as an art historian with a major in Asian languages, and that took me to Asia and sort of disillusioned me with traditional spiritual approaches in the Asian style. And I reconnected then with my childhood love of nature, and pretty much abandoned the humanities and went into the sciences. But by then it was to late to become a real scientist, and I was too tainted by my time again among the poets and the artists. So I had to become a very soft hard scientist. So I got a degree in conservation of natural resources—about as soft a science as you’ll ever hope to touch. And I did a lot of traveling around, looking for a viable, vibrant, numinous approach to spiritual reality, and the only place I found it was in the Amazon basin, where, as you know, there are extremely archaic groups of people, people who never submitted themselves to the historical process, the way, the peoples of the Middle East and Europe did. And there there flourishes, through the use of chemically complex plants, techniques and traditions for accessing a world invisible to the rest of us—a world of forces and information that is transhuman, supernatural, if the word means anything.

But this supernatural dimension is anchored in the plants that live in our world. And—my brother was a botanist and I had botanical training—as we studied the psychoactive plants of the world, especially the New World tropics where they seem to be concentrated, we were simultaneously exalted by the realization that we had found a doorway—a real doorway—into hyperspace, and at the same time tremendously upset and alarmed by the fact that this doorway is in the process of being dismantled by the forces of human ignorance that are not even aware of its existence. So this was the impulse behind the decision on the part of my partner, Kat, and I, that these plants must be saved. They must be preserved—in germplasm repositories, or botanical gardens, or something like that—toward a day when they can be studied, and the power, the dimensions within them, can be given their real weight.

So to this end we founded a botanical garden in Hawaiʻi that is specifically dedicated to preserving plants with a history of shamanic importance. And I mention this because this is the real world political work that we do, and everything else that I will say today will be barely anchored in any world familiar to most of us. But there is a political anchoring, there is a place where it all comes tangential to the World Bank, and the IMF, and the host governments, and so forth and so on. It is tremendously important to preserve this shamanic option, if for no other reason then we do not know what it is. We do not know what it is.

Well, so at the break, if you come up, our newsletter of the botanical garden is the large stack of beige paper, and there are 300 copies of that, so I hope there’s enough for everyone. And we do exist on donations, so if any of you are philanthropists, we can certainly tell you how to spend your money. We have many plans for your money.

Okay, I wasn’t kidding about what an honor I think it is to address the Jung society. At one point in my life my greatest desire was to become a Jungian analyst. And I had the good fortune of coming upon Jung very young. I was about fifteen when a very precocious friend of mine brought Psychology and Alchemy in the Cary F. Baynes translation. I think it had just been brought out. And we were stunned, and we read it from cover to cover, and then went on to Mysterium Coniunctionis, Aion: The Studies and the Phenomenologies of the Self. I said to someone yesterday we read all the books of Jung that the Jungians never read. They seem to stop up there at the front of the line with The Archetypes of the collective Unconscious and The Personality Type. But to my mind it was the late stuff that was fascinating. And I am slightly puzzled, and we were talking about it last night, at the distance between the Jungian community and the psychedelic community, because they seem to me—the unschooled observer—to be definitely sharing the same concerns, and, strangely enough, they share much of the same history and geography. Basel was of course Jung’s home town—it was Albert Hofmann’s home town. Did one half of town know what the other half was doing? I’m not sure.

The relationship of Jung to the collective unconscious as it’s discoverer has been always somewhat puzzling to me, because, of course, if you know the history of twentieth-century art, you know that Dada—which was the great prefigurative movement for surrealism—rose in Zürich. So, you know, we got LSD, the schools of modern art that laid great stress on the irrational, and the great schools of psychology that extended the boundaries of the unconscious, all rappelling around in these little Swiss towns, and it’s interesting to imagine conversations or meetings that might have taken place when people slightly left their ordinary habits and wandered into bars they didn’t know, and drank with people they never met before.

Because Jung provided maps of the unconscious. And at sixteen, when we were beginning to experiment with this—and let me stress: this was before the great social waves of LSD-taking of the 1960s. Just preceding that, from about 1963 to 1965, we were frantic for maps of the unconscious. And Freud was useless. I mean, the notion that the contents of the psychedelic experience could be reduced to what Freud called day residues and repressed sexual desires, and stuff like that, didn’t wash. Within ten minutes you could tell that was not a serviceable metaphor. Jung, on the other hand, offered a vast pantheon of gods and archetypes and psychic complexes forgotten or abandoned. I mean, I thought of Jung basically as what I call a noetic archeologist: someone who goes with toothbrush and nutpick to dig away the detritus from the bones of vanished idea systems. And if any of you have read the works of Jung in the Bollingen Set, you know that the richness of it is all in the footnotes. I mean, here was a man who raised the footnote to a high art, and who was aware of a literature that nobody else (to my mind) seemed to know about. That Jung’s references reach a thousand years deep into the past with great density of reference. I mean, this is where I learned about Macrobius and Dosephius and Dionysus the Pseudo-Areopagite, and all those other folks that you just never hear about. It was my introduction to the underbelly of Western civilization was through Jung.

Well, to my mind—and now I’ll theme this in to today’s theme—I think maria mentioned that Jung did not have a lot to say about shamanism. He came to it late in his life, and he had already worked through the exegesis of the symbol systems of the European mind, and so he was sort of content to indicate shamanism as an area where more work was to be done. And then the great follow-on scholar who was Mircea Eliade, who then actually studied shamanism, showed what it’s archetypal underpinnings were in all times and places. And the combination of Jung and Eliade, I think, pretty much delivered us as firm map of the psyche, as dependable a map of the psychic geography, as we can expect to have until we make the trip ourselves and readjust the landscape with our own notes and observations.

For Jung, the great path into the unconscious was alchemy. And alchemy is an interesting pivotal domain, because I think we could, in a way, say it lies halfway between the concerns of an archaic shamanism and halfway between the concerns of a quasi-scientific psychedelic attempt to explore consciousness. Mircea Eliade wrote a brilliant book on alchemy called The Forge and the Crucible, which is the bridge to show you how you go from Jungian psychology into an understanding of alchemy that approximates Eliade. The notion for the alchemists that Jung brought forth very strongly was the idea of projection of psychic contents, projection of the active imagination, onto processes and objects in the exterior world. In the case of the alchemist, it was the swirling chemical processes in the alembics, in their alchemical vessels—that they projected the great round of the archetypes onto these chemical processes. They saw crystalization, sublimation, separation as statements about the contents of the psyched as much as about statements about the exterior world, because for them the firm division between mind and matter—the firm ontological division between mind and matter that is built into Western thinking now—did not exist. That comes with René Descartes, with the invention of what’s called the res extensa (the extended world), and the res virens (the interior world, which has no spacial dimension). So for the alchemist, mind and matter were two terms whose mutual exclusivity could be blurred under certain circumstances, and the terms of one could migrate toward the other.

Well now, we, as moderns ordinarily only experience this state when we are intoxicated by hallucinogenic drugs, or when we are in a state of severe psychic weakness—when there is, then, overwhelming from the unconscious that is not with the permission with the ego, as what happens with the psychedelic experience. Well, all of these various ways of approaching the psyche seem fairly abstract and bloodless and removed from daily existence, unless the psychedelic experience is present. And then it vivifies these metaphors. It makes clear what these various perennial traditions are talking about.

So what I thought I would try to do today—and you’re welcome to try and steer it other directions in the question and answer period—is: the workshop is Sacred Plants as Guides. A lot of information has to be imparted if we’re going to satisfy my pedagogical urge here, because I would really like to leave you with information that you didn’t have before, some of which may have practical efficacy in your own life. So in thinking about this very large issue, “sacred plants as guides,” I basically break it down into three categories for ease of handling in a context like this. And they are a kind of survey: how many plants are there, what are the chemicals that drive them, and what is their geographical distribution? In other words, just what are the botanical facts of the matter? And then, secondly, I think in order to understand what these things mean for spiritual growth and psychic development, you have to place them in a context. And the context is chronological and historical. Have these things always been around? Have shamans always been taking them? How do they relate to the synthetic drugs that have been developed in the last couple of centuries? So the history of our relationship to the pharmacologically induced ecstasy. And then finally, and probably we’ll get to this this afternoon: the phenomenology of the experience, and the techniques for achieving and controlling it. Because there is a practicum here. This is not a course in Mongolian philology, or something like that. The ultimate idea is to get those who feel called to the task sufficiently informed and psychically empowered that they can push off into the oceans of mind and the interior, with some fair amount of confidence that they’ll return to the port with all hands.

So let’s start, sort of, with a survey. Let me see, I’m going to talk until 11:30. So let’s start with the survey, then, and just talk about what the options are, and this will be sort of unstructured and conversational with forays into other areas. First of all, the striking thing when you want to study psychoactive drugs and plants, and their impact on human culture—and that’s really what interests me, is how drugs affect culture. After I went through Jung and Eliade, my next port of call was McLuhan. And I absorbed very deeply the notion that media structure civilizations in ways that the civilizations are never aware of. And Jung of course talked about print, and manuscript, and electronic culture. He did not talk about drugs. But drugs are a form of media, because information travels through the drug to the mind—that’s a medium of communications.

And various societies wear drugs like clothing with no awareness of their existence at all, somewhat in the way that a fish relates to water. So that, for instance, if you’re in Dublin, you are swimming in the ambiance of an alcohol culture. You don’t have to be drunk to be in Dublin (although it helps), but the entire society is premised on the possibility, you see? The entire society is premised on the possibility. In India the entire society is premised on the possibility of hashish intoxications. And social mores, building design—everything takes account of this. Cultures don’t see this. We do not think of ourselves as a meat/sugar/alcohol culture. People do not walk around saying, “Oh wow, I’m so high on meat, alcohol, and sugar, I can hardly stand it,” but they are. And certain consequences flow from that. So as I make my way through this survey, you need to bear in mind that a culture takes its tone, its clothing, from the drugs that it emits, and you can know a great deal about a culture from the drugs that it excludes, the drugs that it excoriates and fears, because various drugs accentuate the suppress different parts of the psyche. So these are statements about anxiety about various parts of the psyche.

The striking thing when you set out to do a cultural survey like this is you discover that our culture—the culture of Europe, for most of us; some of us are black, some of us are Asian, but largely the roots of American culture lie in Europe—this is the most pharmacologically impoverished cultural area on the entire planet. It has the longest history of disconnection from any kind of ecstatic intoxication. And the cultural forms of Europe—linear, abstract, narcissistic, and promoting of male dominance—are, to my mind, exactly what you would expect in a culture long deprived of the boundary-dissolving, numinous encounter with the vegetable mind. So a lot of the cultural problems we are dealing with are based on the fact that we, as Europeans, have no place for drugs. We don’t really know quite what to do with that.

As you move south from Europe into the content of human origins—Africa—you discover that, well, Africa supports a tropical ecosystem, which, because that means increased speciation of plants, you would think would indicate an increased number of hallucinogens. Africa is surprisingly poor in hallucinogens. This is not well understood. As we go through this survey, I will make reference to numerous unsolved mysteries in the field. And I always try to do this because I’m hoping there are graduate students listening who are looking for research topics, and there are numerous research areas where important work can be done. One of them is this question of the poverty of hallucinogens in Africa: why? Does it have something to do with the extreme length of time that Africa has been subject to human impact? Probably. Because Africa is species-poor generally, for a tropical continent.

However, in the interest of thoroughness, there is one hallucinogenic drug complex that should be mentioned, because it raises issues that are important for the broader context, and that is ibogaine—or Tabernanthe iboga, the so-called Bwiti cults of Zaire and Gabon. Now, this is the psychedelic about which we in the West probably know the least. It has spawned no waves of social hysteria, it has not been the subject of pogroms or media freakout. And it’s a powerful hallucinogen. And it’s not only a powerful hallucinogen, but it has a component of sexual excitation to it which is ancillary and unusual. If you have actually ever looked into the subject of aphrodisiacs, the truth is there ain’t any. There are things which cause genital itching and prolonged erection, and so forth, but a true aphrodisiac—a chemical which would impel you to want to have sex—there’s nothing quite like that, except this Tabernanthe iboga is very interesting. We tend to think of an aphrodisiac, because we tend to break our heart away from our genitals as a kind of cold thing, I think. But when you talk to these people who are taking ibogaine, they don’t talk about aphrodisiac, they say, “This causes open-heartedness.” One-heartedness they call it. And one-heartedness is what they are striving for in the Bwiti cult. And they achieve it. And they achieve it, and it allows them to resist cultural incursions by Christian missionaries. Bwiti is the main cultural force that is holding back conversion to Christianity by these people.

Fang culture, the people who are using this ibogaine, it’s an interesting culture. There’s a great deal of anxiety in Fang culture about divorce. In relationships between men and women, divorce is very easily obtained among the Fang, but it’s always followed by extremely lengthy and protracted negotiations with the family of the divorced partner, about return of dowry, and a huge amount of neurosis and agony and murder and violence goes on over these dowry return negotiations. The ibogaine stands right in the middle of this as a source of one-heartedness, making divorce less likely. So it’s very important as a force for social cohesion.

And I mention this because, when we reach South America, we will see ayahuasca functioning not as a type of aphrodisiac or a thing to unify couples, but as a kind of telepathic pheromone that unifies whole small tribal groups together into a one-hearted, one-minded modality. And if we get into a discussion about the possible evolutionary impact of hallucinogens, we’ll see that it always lies in the direction of these collectivized states of mind, and dissolution of boundaries between people.

Other than Tabernanthe iboga, Africa’s hallucinogens are trivial, and I won’t mention them in the time we have. Cannabis is in Africa as well, but cannabis is worldwide now, and probably has been for quite some time. Cannabis is a special case—chemically and culturally. We tend to think of cannabis as a recreational drug, but that’s because in the twentieth century we always smoke our cannabis. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, cannabis was eaten. And jelly forms of cannabis that were eaten—judging by the pros of people like Theodore Gautier, Baudelaire, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, and people like that—it was as powerful as LSD without doubt. I mean, these people were being swept into titanically alien dimensions.

Well, when we cross form Africa to India—India, interestingly, of course, as you all know: tremendous depth of at least concern with the spiritual dimension, if not realization of it; that’s a tougher call—India would be a likely place to look for indigenous hallucinogenic plant cults, simply because of the spiritual obsession that characterizes Indian thought. When we look at the historical foundations of Indian thought, we find that it all rests on a group of texts composed between 4,500 and 2,000 years ago called the Vedas. And the Vedas are nothing less but the world’s longest continuing advertisement for a hallucinogenic plant. The problem is: we don’t know what this plant is. This is the mysterious soma of the Rigvedas. And mandala nine of the Rigveda is entirely a hymn to soma. Soma held Hinduism of the Vedic phase together. Later it was repressed.

And again, graduate students pay attention: one of the very interesting problems to be looked at by sociologists, social psychologists, and anthropologists is: how, if a drug (once discovered), or a plant (once discovered), is so wonderful, how can these things ever be lost or forgotten? And yet, in several instances we deal with literatures which sing the praises of some plant or drug, the identity of which we cannot figure out, or it becomes a big arm wrestle between various competing schools of scholarship. We do not, to this day, know what soma was. Gordon Wasson—who some of you may know as the modern discoverer of the mushroom cults of Mexico, founder of the science of enthnomycology—believed to his dying breath that soma was Amanita muscaria, the red-topped, white-speckled Amanita. This is a mushroom which has a major role in Tungusic and Arctic shamanism. But to say, as Wasson did, that this is the supreme entheogen of all time is not supported by the evidence, I think. Wasson’s own efforts to become intoxicated on Amanita muscaria were not successful.. My efforts have not been successful. Occasionally you will hear anecdotal evidence. Someone will tell a story about eating Amanita muscaria that, obviously, they had a staggering breakthrough—a rupture of plane, as Mircea Eliade says in his wonderful phrase. But it’s extremely undependable.

And when you look at the botany of Amanita muscaria, you discover that its chemical constituency is seasonally variant, genetically variant, geographically variant, and so forth. So, often, I think, as we gain a understanding of a given shamanism, we will see that it depended on an extremely deep local knowledge. And if you take what a Yakut shaman says about Amanita muscaria and attempt to apply it in the national forests of New Mexico, you could end up with a tag on your toe. This kind of information doesn’t travel well. There are old shamans and bold shamans, but there are no old bold shamans!

In looking at the Indian subcontinent for other hallucinogens that may have made a contribution, the obvious one to my mind is Stropharia cubensis, the mushroom which grows in the dung of cows, and that the book that my brother and I wrote was about. Other possibilities: some of you may know that there are a family of the Argyreia family of morning glories, an Asian family of morning glories, distributed from India to Micronesia. Thirteen species, all containing psychoactive ergot alkaloids. None with a history of human usage.

Now, this is another area which really fascinates me. Why do some plants become discovered by human beings and become the objects of cults which last millennia, and others are never discovered at all in societies absolutely obsessed with spiritual advancement? This Argyreia nervosa is the perfect example, because you take the seeds—the seeds are the active part—and you don’t need much of this thing. You need four or five seeds; less than a tablespoon of plant material which, I would bet, would make it (per unit volume) probably one of the most powerful hallucinogens in nature. And the hallucinations are absolutely stunning. And nobody has ever claimed this. It’s free for the taking. This means you can cut a deal with an ally that doesn’t belong to the Hindus, the Mayans, or the somebody else. It’s an unoccupied parking space in hyperspace.

And it’s very interesting. The discoveries are continuous. Just a year ago, some phytochemists in the Midwest discovered a plant. It’s always been there, nobody’s ever taken it very seriously, treated it like a weed—Desmanthus illinoensis, the Illinois bundleweed. This is suggestive, that it’s called bundleweed, because a medicine bundle is, of course, a shaman’s mojo bag, you know? So bundleweed: six percent by dry weight N,N-Dimethyltryptamine. The largest concentration of DMT in any plant, and unclaimed by native peoples, unknown to the folk medicine of the North American Indians as far as we can tell. Well, so this is very interesting.

Continuing our survey, since we’re now somewhere on the Eurasian continent, we should mention Papaver somniferum, the opium poppy. With cannabis, this is probably the oldest human narcotic known. The later phase of Minoan civilization was entirely based on opium, on the use of opium. And, in fact, when Michael Ventris translated the Linear B tablets, they got these tallies, and they thought at first that the symbol for opium must be the symbol for wheat, because the tallies were so huge of the stuff being moved and sold. And then, when they sorted it out, they realized: no, for the last thousand years of its existence, the Minoan civilization drifted deeper and deeper into an opium narcosis that was its way, I think, of anesthetizing the pain of the death of this last outpost of the goddess religion. Because that’s what it was: it was a cultural anachronism. While Asian minor had gone over to god king city-states and bronze-tipped spears, the people of Minoan Crete had kept the old, old archaic religion that came out of Africa. And then, in the last gasp of that Minoan culture, those mysteries were handed on to the mainland of Greece and became the Mysteries at Eleusis and other cult sites. It was said by the contemporary commentators of the Hellenistic world: the rites practiced in secret at Eleusis are practiced in public at Knossos. And this was the difference, you know: the going underground of the old proto-Minoan mother religion

In modern times we have a horror of opium. I mean, people are amazed that I even mention it in the same breath, but it doesn’t hurt to remind ourselves that this virulently addictive substance, opium, was not even noticed to be addictive by anybody until 1627, when the English physician John Playfair for the first time commentated that opium, once taken over a long period of time, then there would be a requirement that it be taken throughout life.

We’re right in a middle of a drug war at the moment, and it’s interesting in that context to notice how the goals of drug wars can change. A hundred years ago, the British Navy was involved in what was called the Opium Wars in China. Very few people in the modern world have bothered to inform themselves to find out that the Opium Wars were about the right of the British government to deal opium. The emperor of China did not want opium dealt in the ports of China. And the British government used cannon to enforce their desire to sell opium in the ports of China. Why were the English trying to sell opium in the ports of China? Because the tea trade had collapsed through overproduction, and they were stuck with all these tea ships. They had created a whole global infrastructure for the sale of tea. When the market fell out on tea, they just turned to opium. They grew it in Goa and they sold it in China, and this was government policy less than a hundred and twenty years ago.

Okay, well, moving on, then, from Eurasia—and I’m sure I’m missing different things, but if missed your favorite thing, bring it up in the question period—to the North American continent. And the North American continent is—I almost said similarly cursed like Europe, but that’s just my prejudice—the North American content is similarly poor in hallucinogens. There are no very interesting hallucinogens in North America, and North American Indians and North American culture did not avail itself of this ecstatic plant-induced shamanism. It tended more to go for what’s called ordeal shamanism—the sun dance thing where you hang yourself by your pectorals on hooks, and stuff like that. I mean, there are other ways to attain these visions. But, you see, that absence of good hallucinogens in North America just reinforced that whole beer and woolen and uptight thing that came from Europe.

The only major hallucinogen to have a role in Native American culture is, of course, peyote. And many people, without informing themselves, imagine that peyote is something which goes millennia into the past, and this is absolutely not true. Peyote use may well be less than a thousand years old among Native Americans. When you go back into the old graves and the very old sites in the Rio Grande valley in the south, you don’t find peyote, what you find are the beans of Sophora secundiflora. You all probably know this plant, though you may not know its name. It’s the plant that produces the very hard red and black bean that they can string, if you all know what collarínes are. These [???] which are related to these things. Okay, that stuff contains cytosine and cysteine. These are what are called ordeal poisons.

And it might be worthwhile to just talk for a minute about ordeal poisons. I said there’s more than one way to skin a cat: there’s more than one way to have this experience that shoves you through to an awareness of the numinous—that’s what we’re trying to do, is have an awareness of the numinous. Well, in a certain parts of the world where hallucinogens were not present in the biome, people concentrated on ordeal poisons. And what an ordeal poison is, is: it’s a chemical compound that you take it, and you think you’re going to die, and you beg for death, and you do not die—you get better, you’re fine. And you’re so damn glad to be alive that you undergo an abreaction. You get straight, you shed some of your complexes, and you turn over a new leaf, is is what it is. Well, in Madagascar these ordeal poisons have been brought to a high state of perfection. Also in Malaya. There’s a poison complex that replaces a hallucinogenic drug complex, and these are horrific poisons. So what apparently was going on in the Rio Grande valley was, after centuries of this Sophora secundiflora cult, someone discovered peyote and said, “My god! Thank god!”

And then the other plant which was big in southern California, Northern Mexico, and across the southwest were the tropane-containing daturas. The so-called Toloache religion of southern California. Well, these are deliriant confusants that are—unless you have a psychic constitution that is not like mine, you can’t take these things. They’re too… I just found them confusing. It was like a kind of madness. And also physically very difficult to handle. I experimented. I had a phase with these things when I was in Nepal, because there are sadhus (holy men) in the Kathmandu valley who swear by this stuff. And if you’re in Kathmandu, you may notice in the gutter—well, you’ll notice plenty in the gutter—but you may also notice these datura pods, empty datura pods. And I noticed them and started asking questions, and then, out at the king’s game preserve, past Pashupatinath, I found a bunch of these things and laid in a supply.

But it is an occult, watery—it’s a dimension of confusion, not a dimension of high awareness. And I think some of you have heard me tell the story about the reason I gave it up was an Englishman, a friend of mine, who lived in this little village in Nepal where I lived. He was also experimenting with this stuff, and one day I was buying potatoes and tomatoes in the market, and I ran into him, and we started having a conversation. And in the course of the conversation he revealed that he believed we were in his apartment, and then I knew that we were losing hold on our grounding. So I don’t recommend that. I don’t have a whole lot to say about it. Apparently it’s a thing for magic; power magic. And I’ve never been particularly interested in that because I’m afraid of it. I’m a watcher. I like to look. I like to get very close to it and watch it, but I’m not into grabbing it, or doing anything with it. I have a feeling that would lead to a catastrophe for me, personally.

Okay, where are we now? Northern Mexico. Now we’ve gone all around. We started in Europe, we went down into Africa, crossed the Eurasian continent, North America, North Mexico. Now things get interesting. Because, as you leave the Sonoran uplands and go south, in the Sierra Mazateca is this mushroom complex which Valentina and Gordon Wasson discovered in the 1953s. Seventeen to twenty-two species—it depends on who’s counting—of extremely endemic (meaning very localized) species of mushrooms, all producing psilocybin, coincident with the cultural side of the Mayan Mixtec and Mazatecan civilizations. And this is psilocybin: an extraordinarily powerful, visionary, and benign hallucinogenic metabolite. Once the Wassons had nailed down this Mexican mushroom complex, then people started checking, and they discovered these mushrooms or con-specific species in many localities.

Two that are worth mentioning are the pacific northwest—Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia—which appears to be the world center for species density of the psilocybin gene. And, strangely enough, very good ethnographic research turns up no hint that these Kwakiutl, Tsimshian, Tlingit, and other people had any hint of this. They lived in the center of the psilocybin distribution complex, and as far as we can tell their shamanism—which was highly evolved—never discovered or made use of this. Not so these civilizations of Mesoamerica.

The other place where these mushrooms have now been discovered—and the range seems to be extending every year—is Europe. The tragedy of European civilization is that the lógos was apparently there all the time. The English countryside, I understand, is now practically a scene of annual mushroom runs that are not unlike the lemming runs of Scandinavia, and everybody pours out to collect the semilanceata mushrooms. I’ve been told—I haven’t been to these sites—but I’ve been told that Iona, where the Book of Kells was composed, and where Saint Columba went, is covered with mushrooms. It’s very clearly a mushroom ecology. Attention graduate students: the tracing of mushroom motifs in European art and civilization and culture is an extremely rich untapped field. If you need some clues, look at family escutcheons, look at family crests. In France and the Italian parts of France, the morel family has the morel on their escutcheon. There are other mushroom families and mushroom names. So this may have been the struggle between paganism and Christianity; may have revolved around a mushroom. We know druids were into plants. We know they were into oak groves. But the plant that is always mentioned as the druidic psychic plant of choice is mistletoe. But mistletoe is chemically very disappointing. And I wonder if mistletoe is not—it wasn’t the plant they wanted to symbolize, they wanted to symbolize the symbiosis of one plant upon another. It’s that the mistletoe symbolizes epiphytic existence. Anyway, this is an untapped area.

Once you get into the New World tropics, then you are in the great domain of the hallucinogenic plants. And no one knows why it is that the tropics of the New World are tremendously rich in hallucinogens. I mean, I don’t know how many of you are botanists or or biologists, but try to imagine figuring out a set of evolutionary constraints that were operating on one side of the planet but not on the other. You know? When we take, for instance, the jungles of southern Colombia and compare them with, let us say, the jungles of New Guinea, these are both continental floras, both equatorial, both climaxed at a species-rich climax, and one has dozens of hallucinogens in it, and the other has none. None! This is not well understood. Theories range as wildly as, obviously, that South America must be where the flying saucer landed, and that’s where the genes were seeded.

I confess, I’m not sure why it is. At first I thought it had to do with extremely primitive state—so-called primitive—extremely archaic state of culture in the South American jungles; that they represent a real stone age culture. Where, when you go into Indonesia, it may look primitive to you, but the Dutch were there before the English arrived in North America. It has had centuries and centuries in which these things could be forgotten. But, of course, then here come the botanists who care nothing for ethnographic data, and who simply carry out plant surveys and chemical analysis of plants. They can’t find these hallucinogens either. So this is a great mystery.

In the tropics of Mesoamerica and the equatorial tropics of the New World there’s a vast panoply of hallucinogens—not only in the mushroom complex, but then also this ayahuasca or yagé complex that we’ve referred to several times. This is a huge jungle vine. And as we cross into the yagé area, we also cross an interesting barrier, because we move from plants—single plants which are hallucinogenically active—into the realm of preparations. We’re on the threshold of the concept drug here, because what ayahuasca is, is two plants which are not active unless brought into combination with each other. One plant contains a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, and the other plant contains DMT—which would be destroyed in the gut if taken orally, unless it were taken orally in the presence of an MAO inhibitor. This was not understood by Western pharmacology until 1956, but it was understood by Amazonian shamans millennia ago. So they bring these two things together, and by varying the ratio between the plant containing the beta-carbolines that inhibit MAO and the plants that contain DMT, they can intensify or deemphasize the visions.

Well, most of the hallucinogens in the Amazon basin run on tryptamine of some sort, usually DMT. In the upper basin of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, like that, you get these these yagé ayahuasca beverages. These are things you drink, and then it comes on in this outlandish trip. As you go down into the lower basin, the Banisteriopsis cult gives way to these snuff cults—ipina and niopo, depending on the languages. These don’t depend on an MAO-inhibitor for their activity because they’re absorbed through the subnasal mucosa, which is an extremely effective way for getting drugs into the system. The problem with that complex, the snuff complex, is that we are just physically such delicate and wimpy people that we can’t stand that route of drug administration. Because what they do is they toast these seeds of Anadenanthera peregrina, this huge leguminous tree which is the source of the seed. They toast these seeds and powder them, so what you get is a kind of rough cross between sawdust and charcoal. And then they have a hollow tube about this long, and they load it up with this stuff, and you squat down and put the tube into your nostril, and your friend—your friend, not you, because you would not do it hard enough—your friend then takes a huge breath of air and PSHHH, and it’s just like being hit in the face by a two-by-four. I mean, it’s like being hit in the face. And you fall over backwards, you scream, and you salivate, and you squirm around there in the dirt for a minute or two, and then you sit back up. And by that time the tube has been reloaded for the other nostril. And your eyes, your sinuses can’t believe whats happening to you. So you have to sort out this whole sinus shock which is going on in parallel with, then, an evolving strange state of mind which is beginning to take over and clarify everything. And then there are numerous minor variations on these themes.

I might talk just a little bit about the chemistry of these things, and the chemistry of hallucinogens generally. My attitude toward this question of plants, compounds, drugs—should these things be used for spiritual growth? If the answers no, then that finishes and you don’t have to go any further. If the answer is maybe or yes, then other questions arise. Which compounds out of this whole survey? And at what frequency?And at what dosage? And under what circumstances? And over the years I’ve sort of evolved a three-way test that I will share with you, because I think it’s maybe operationally the most useful thing you’ll hear this weekend.

And that is: if you are contemplating some compound, some plant, then the first thing to ask yourself is: does it occur in nature? Does it have some tangentiality to what is already existing? Because obviously, what exists—that’s nature—has undergone some vast winnowing process out of the set of all things which might exist. In that wonderful phrase of Alfred North Whitehead’s: certain things have undergone the formality of actually occurring. You know? And so certain compounds have undergone the formality of actually occurring in the biological matrix, and so they should be our pool out of which our experimental compounds should be drawn. But this is thousands of compounds. How can we further narrow it?

Well, an excellent way of narrowing it further is to ask the question of this compound: does it have a history of human usage? Does it have a history of human usage? That is your FDA approval. Because if you can point to a tribe of people who have been taking this plant (or mushroom, or whatever it is) for millennia, and they don’t have miscarriages, tumors, cataracts, blindness, Down syndrome, eight fingers on the left hand, or whatever it is, then you can be fairly confident that this thing is benign; that these people have observed its action on pregnant women, the elderly, those with, you know—and that it has passed that test.

Then, finally, the narrowest gate through which a compound has to go to intersect my precious body is: it has to have an affinity to ordinary brain chemistry. It has to have an affinity to ordinary brain chemistry. We don’t want to launch something on your brain that it can’t recognize at all, that it has no biosynthetic pathways to degrade, that his no receptors for—just some crazy thing, you know? 5-amino 3-triethyl-finthioenaxodine, or something—we don’t want that. That is not the spirit that we’re acting in here.

So if the compound can get through those three barriers, then it’s an excellent candidate for providing spiritual gain at low physiological impact. Well now, some people may say, “Oh well, you’ve taken all of the fun out of it! All the good things have been tossed aside in this mad rush to purity,” or something. Not at all! The very best stuff was retained in this process, because in terms of relative strength and bizarreness of effect and so forth, the strangest, the most powerful, the most transformative of all hallucinogens in nature or out is dimethyltryptamine—DMT.

And it’s worth talking about DMT for a moment, because it will raise certain issues and distinctions that you may not have been aware of. First of all, DMT is hands down the most powerful of all hallucinogens. I mean, it is so powerful that whatever is in second place is lost over the horizon. Yet—yet!—it is the most benign of all hallucinogens, because it occurs as an endogenous neurotransmitter in the normal human brain. We, every single one of us, at this moment, have N,N-Dimethyltryptamine being synthesized, activated, and degraded in our synaptic membrane. So this is almost a paradox. The most benign of all hallucinogens (the most fast-acting, I should also add) is also the most harmless, the easiest to take. It’s sort of removed—it sort of puts a certain obligation on the experient, because there is no reason to hold back, except that there is this question: does it drive you mad? And then the more serious version of that question: what about the possibility of death by astonishment? This is no joke! Death by astonishment is, I think, probably the major risk we run with this stuff, because the impact of the breakthrough is is so total, so complete, so unexpected.

And, in a way, this sort of brings me back around to my theme, because I encountered DMT, LSD, all of these things, in that very period when I was getting set to take flight as a Jungian analyst. And what completely blew my mind about DMT—and I mention it again: here is an opportunity for research—is how trans- (here’s a heretical construction!) how trans-archetypal the content of the flash seemed. I was appalled, because not only had I a certain amount of interest in Jung and proclivity along those lines, but my original major had been art history. Art historians, what we’re trained to do is to be able to look at a motif and say, “Oh yes, I’m familiar with this from ceramic, from second millennia Peru, and also Mandean embroidery work.” We know motifs. We’re trained to recognize and connect disparate aesthetic domains. Well, when I smoked DMT and came down, I said, you know: “This is not on the map. I can’t believe it. This doesn’t connect up to anything. How can there be domains of the human mind that do not announce themselves in folklore, fairy tales, dreams or mandala painting that are so removed from the Venn of what is human that they are apparently not accessible in structuring our maps of ourself and our psyche?” And that, for me was, the contact with what I call—and I didn’t call it it this; Rudolf Otto called it this, and this term influenced Jung; Otto preceded Jung—was: it is the wholly other. And if there is an archetype of a wholly other, then this is it. But perhaps the wholly other transcends the archetypes.

This may explain to some degree Jung’s interest in Gnosticism, especially the Valentinian school of Gnosticism which holds that there is a higher and hidden father, all-god, who is outside the machinery of cosmic fate. And it seemed to me that, in those extremely profound DMT flashes, I was actually witnessing a domain outside the machinery of the archetypes—which is for us, as moderns, that’s what machinery of fate is. It’s not zodiacal machinery, it’s hard-wiring in our psychology and our genes that gives us our fate.

Well, so, having said that, I’ve not only made the survey, but also brought us to (by ending with DMT) the subject matter of this quest. And I want to make it clear: I speak about the power of the psychedelic experience because I think people should be informed of their birthright, and I feel very antsy around the notion that someone might go from birth to the grave without ever having a psychedelic experience. It makes me as antsy as the notion that somebody might go from birth to the grave without having a sexual experience. It’s a strange kind of protective denial, or a kind of expression of fear. This is our birthright. This is part of what it means to be human.

These altered states of consciousness, I think, are pretty much scripted into the existence of women, because most of them will give birth, which is an organically scripted psychedelic experience from which there is no escape—unless, of course, you go for the drug knockout, the spinal, and then you miss everything. But biologically, physiologically, women are set up for this experience. Men are not. It’s possible to build such barriers against overwhelment that it never happens in your whole life.

And I believe that if we psychologically analyze the effects of these psychedelics, what they do is: they dissolve boundaries. That’s all. I mean, if you interview ten thousand people who’ve had a psychedelic trip, each one has their own hierophany, their own hieros gamos, that unfolded for them, but the sum total of it is: boundaries dissolve. And then, whatever’s on the other side of your boundary comes flooding in to claim you, and to reshape and remake your psyche.

Well, I see the entire illness of our civilization as an ego-inflationary illness. We have gone so sick with ego that we are literally murdering the planet rather than confronting the consequences of our psychic imbalance. And the psychedelics act to redress this. They are almost an inoculation against the ego. And I see the ego as phenomenon arising in historical time—or rather, actually, history is caused by the ego. But the ego is a component of the psyche that arose in the post-archaic phase, in the post-psychedelic phase. It’s entirely a modern invention. It’s less than 15,000 years old. And the assumptions of the ego are the source of our neurosis, our disequilibrium.

Why did the ego arise? It arose because of the climatologically enforced abandonment of these psychedelic religions of the archaic period. In other words, here is the scenario as I see it: primates—even non-advanced primates like squirrel monkeys, howler monkeys, these kind of primates—all have male dominance hierarchies. The whole thing with primates is about male dominance. But a lot of things about human beings mark us as the most unique member of the primate group. Obviously we look different from any other monkeys. Even the stranger monkeys look more like the normal monkeys than we look like them, or they look like us. Our upright posture. The other thing about us is our suppressed estrous cycle. We cannot tell at a glance whether a woman is in heat or not. And yet, obviously, that had a tremendous shaping force on the social psychology of of the primates.

I believe that everything about us that is noble and worth saving occurs against the grain. That, if we had followed the grain, we would still be competing with jackals for the carcasses left by lions of large game kills on the plains of Africa. But when the African continent began to dry up and we were forced out of the trees where we had an arboreal vegetarian lifestyle, we came under great pressure to expand our diet. And I believe that the great unstudied factor in human evolution and human emergence is the effect of a complex diet on our emerging species. And it’s not only the presence of hallucinogens such as psilocybin in the diet, but other things as well.

Psilocybin is the most spectacular case, and if you came to see Darwin, you’d hear about evolution. So you came to see me, so you have to hear to hear this little theory about human emergence. Most of you can probably recite it by heart now. But it’s a three-step feedback loop from a fairly bright monkey to a fairly stupid human being. And the way it works is like this: these monkeys come down out of the trees. They’re predating on kills of ungulate mammals made by lions. They’re competing with jackals. They’re testing all the foods in the environment and, lo and behold, in the manure of these ungulate mammals that are eradiating across the African continent there are what are called coprophilic mushrooms. And the presence of large amounts of tryptophan in manure as a substrate means that these coprophilic mushrooms elaborate psilocybin. So here in this new grassland environment are the psilocybin mushrooms. Well, these proto-hominid creatures, testing foods for their diet, would reach the psilocybin and would test it.

Well, then this three-part feedback loop to humanness then comes into play, and it works like this. Very light doses of psilocybin—so light that you cannot, an hour and a half or two hours later, tell you’ve taken anything; you say, “I don’t feel it. I feel completely normal. I must not have taken enough. That dose, if you would submit yourself to being tested by an optometric apparatus, we could show you that your vision has improved slightly. This is an effect of eating small amounts of psychoactive amines: increase of visual acuity. Well, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that, if you’re a hunting animal competing in a highly competitive environment, and suddenly someone hands you a pair of chemical binoculars, you are going to be a more successful hunter than other members of your species who are not availing themselves of this food item. So there was reinforcement there: a-ha, if we eat these mushrooms in small amounts, we will be more successful hunters. Or maybe it was never raised to consciousness as an if–then relationship, it was just: “We eat mushrooms, we hunt well” kind of thing.

Then, if you eat slightly more of the psilocybin—if you bring slightly more of it into your diet—it’s what’s called a CNS stimulator: central nervous system stimulant. An effect of all CNS stimulants is what’s called arousal. And arousal means simply that you can’t sit still, you’re very restless, you’re very energetic, and often, in the male animal, you have an erection. It’s an overall systemic arousal. Arousal. And if you witness this situation in monkeys, monkeys are very hang loose kinda characters, and so they just all fall together in a heap and make love. And this increases what anthropologists and primatologists like to call successful instances of copulation. This means that this increased interest in sex, in combination with an increase success in obtaining food, is creating the perfect situation in which there will be a population boom of these creatures. They’re eating better, they’re enjoying themselves more, and they have better relationships with each other—so population boom is on the way.

Well then, the next and final level is, when you raise the dose higher so you’re no longer restless or interested in sex or any other thing, but you’re flattened with the ecstatic unfolding of the full numinous hallucinogenic rupture of plane, then—and this occurs in the tribal context—then there is boundary dissolution, group sexual activity, and group bonding and identification. And this is where this telepathic coherence, this inner dynamic of cohesion and caring that we see in primitive people to some small degree, and that we imagine must once have been our birthright, this is where it came to be.

And at those higher levels of psilocybin—most of you probably know language is formed by an organ on one side of the brain called Broca’s area. Broca’s area—the brain being always symmetrically constructed—Broca’s area has a twin on the opposite side of the brain, but no one knows what’s going on there. It’s apparently a silent area of the brain. Well, when you take psilocybin, there is spontaneous linguistic activity: glossolalia. Henry Munn has written about this in his essay The Mushrooms of Language. It’s almost as though psilocybin is a pheromone that promotes linguistic activity; an effort to take verbal intentionality and connect it up to the ontos of being in some way. And then it’s almost as though words are born out of you. You give birth to words. And these concrescances of meaning then create a kind of unitarian ambiance which we call understanding.

Language is a miracle. I mean, make no mistake about it, I don’t think any amount of dissection of monkeys or human cadavers will give you an insight into language. Language is a behavior of some sort—so bizarre, so many orders of magnitude more complex than anything else we do, that for all practical purposes this is the thumbprint of God upon creation: human language. And it’s a self-transforming thing. It keeps bootstrapping itself to higher and higher levels, and it creates for us the entire ambiance of reality. Once we had words, we quirky replaced reality with them.

And so I believe that what psilocybin promotes is cognitive activity: the coordination of visual input with plans and strategies for hunting or acquisition or whatever, it promotes this increased arousal—which really, in a way, this arousal is nothing more than a reclaiming of your animal body. You feel restless, you feel your muscles, you feel your genitals, you feel you place in space and time. You are reclaiming your body. And then, finally, it inducts you into this domain of the lógos; a religious hierophany. Something that we, as moderns, are absolutely as in awe of as our mushroom-munching ancestors 25,000 years ago. We can’t reduce it. We don’t know what it is.

You know, Jung was always so concerned that people say it’s only psychological, it’s only the psyche. I’ve got news for you. It may only be the psyche, but the psyche is a there is. And as we came into a relationship with the mushroom, humanness emerged on the African veld and was able to stabilize itself for a few millennia, and then we fell into history—because of climatological change; for many reasons. But we literally fell into history. And now we operate in this lower domain; a domain of limitation, of misunderstanding, of low-grade languages. And we are neurotic, we are unhappy, we are dysfunctional. And I believe this is because our connection to the lógos, to the informing voice that gives meaning to being, has been broken. Over ten thousand years it’s fallen away, and all we’re left with is our spiritual yearnings, our nostalgia for paradise, and our pathologies. And, miraculously, we are left with the time capsule of preservation represented by the rainforest shamanic cultures that use hallucinogens. There lies our answer. But it’s like the ouroboric serpent taking its tail in its mouth. The salvation of the super-future of the planet lies in a recovery of the values, modalities, and religious practices of 25,000 to 50,000 years ago.

Break, break, break! I’m going to disappear. If somebody—

—and we haven’t screened the pile, so we’re just gonna go through them, and I’ll read them aloud. Normally I give long answers, but there’s such a stack of questions here, I’ll try and be General Neal and keep it brief—or General Brief and keep it neal!

The first point to make is that many of your questions cannot be answered, because research into these areas is not allowed. So, often we can’t answer your question. This question, “Does the introduction of excess DMT limit endogenous production?” I can say with fair confidence that that’s never been studied. My guess would be that it does not, because the DMT is—in no sense of the word do you become habituated to DMT. I mean, a person who does DMT wants a year as a fanatically heavy user, I would say. And the question, “Is DMT really so chemically benign?” Again, this has not been studied as you would study it with rats and so forth to determine it. But, experimentally speaking, the amazing thing about DMT is the speed which you return to normal. You return to the baseline of consciousness in under ten minutes. Well, that tells you that the brain is very well able to deal with this compound. One way of judging how toxic a drug or a plant is, is to ask yourself the question, “How long after I take it do I feel completely normal?” And with DMT you feel completely normal fifteen minutes after taking it. It’s the shortest recovery time of any drug.

I’d say the way to answer that question is to do a chemical analysis of the bundleweed. If there’s nothing present but DMT in it, I would think it should be considered safe. Now, there may be other compounds present. In South America it’s possible to contrast two plants—Psychotria viridis, which has almost entirely nothing in it except DMT as the portion of its alkaloid fraction, or Virola carthagenensis, which is used in the making of snuff, and chemically it’s a mess. It looks like they swept the floor. You’ve gone N,N-DMT, 5-MEO-DMT, alpha-methyltryptamine, monomethyltryptamine, 6-hydroxymethyltryptamine—all of this, this you don’t want. You want a surgical strike on the synapse, is what you’re going for, not splattering all kinds of junk all over the place.

The best medium is rye malt agar, no question about it. Go with rye. Organic rye malt extract.

This is the “Where do I get it?” question dressed up in respectable terms. Well, without being too self-serving, let me say my brother and I wrote a book about growing mushrooms called Psilocybin: The Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide by O. T. Oss and O. N. Oeric. I’m O. T. Oss, as you can see. And I really believe in growing mushrooms. If you are, as you sit here, not psychically strong enough or balanced enough to take psilocybin, then if you learn to grow it, at the end of that process, you will be. Because growing the mushroom teaches you cleanliness, punctuality, attention to detail, steadiness—all of these virtues which are the very virtues you need to travel smoothly in that dimension.

Other shamanic hallucinogens that you will find easily available to you without breaking any laws: the heavenly blue morning glory, sold in every seed store and garden store, are not to be taken. Do not take them. They have been dipped in a fungicide that will make you sick. Grow them, and collect your crop, and take that. And this is a major hallucinogen of great antiquity, extremely visionary. The Hawaiian woodrose: you can obtain this from… people who make dry flower arrangements often have these. Pay attention: you want the Hawaiian baby woodrose. If they try to give you something called Hawaiian woodrose, a big clunky thing, that is inactive and won’t do it. The daturas are freely available. I do not recommend them. I recommend against them. But they’re a common landscaping plant in southern California. And the jimsonweed is, of course, growing out in the desert out around Lancaster and other places like that.

There are a couple of companies which have very forthrightly decided to sell plants with a history of shamanic involvement. I own no stock in these companies, so I can recommend them without fear or favoritism. One is called Of The Jungle, up in Sebastopol, California, and the other one is called Dream Gardens, and I think it’s here in Santa Monica. Both of these groups publish astonishingly complete catalogs of psychoactive and shamanically important plants. Okay, that’s access without going to the streets, or committing crimes and things like that.

A very bad law, obviously. Laws so bad that the National Council of Churches, the National Jewish Affairs Committee, and some very large Catholic organizations all filed briefs protesting this thing, and I think that it was actually realized that it was a goof, and it will be brought back in the next—you can’t bring something back to the Supreme Court in a hurry, because then that’s unseemly. But I would bet that within five to ten years this will be overturned, because a close reading of this law means that wine for pesak, or communion, could be construed as a psychoactive substance, and the whole thing is just bad law, bad idea.

This goes to the question I raised this morning: how can a powerful hallucinogen, once discovered, ever be lost? And I’ve only been able to figure out one scenario in which this could happen. It happens like this: people discover a wonderful plant that imparts visions or insight or something, and everybody takes it and enjoys it, and then slowly a hierarchy emerges, a professional class, priests, and only they decree, they decree that only they will be allowed to take it. And then they lord it over the rest of society with an iron hand, and then the rest of the society gets fed up with that, and there’s a slave revolt, and everybody in the ruling class is killed, and the sacrament is lost. I can’t figure any other way that it could happen. And the Vedic thing—this seems quite reasonable—obviously, soma was being more and more confined in its use to a single class, and then that class became viewed as obnoxious, and its overthrow and the death of this sacrament thing follow each other.

“Perhaps such secrets are still being kept”—perhaps they are. The fact that this bundleweed could turn up at so late a date probably means that there are shamanic lineages with secrets that we don’t know. As a field ethnobotanist and an explorer, I’m always interested in the unconfirmable rumor, and there are some doozies! The mysterious beetle from eastern Brazil, which causes intense hallucinogens if eaten—here’s a career for somebody: no hallucinogenic insect has ever been found, and yet there are persistent rumors in different parts of the world of either a butterfly or a beetle that is hallucinogenic. Most shamans in the Amazon (if you spend five or six weeks with them, and take ayahuasca with them, and tromp around with them), when you finally get to know them, they will allow us how there is another magic, which they call the magic of the big trees. And I’ve spent half my life trying to find out the names of the big tress, and I’m still working on it. We have collectors in Peru, and nothing is more exciting than a clump of root stalk or a seed packet that comes across our desk labeled “suspect hallucinogen.” That gets me to the edge of my chair.

Well, this a good time to discuss: what do I think of all these other things on the spiritual market? I don’t know what to think about them. I’m not a spiritual consumer. I’ve never been to a workshop that was wasn’t my own unless it was free. And there’s a lot of stuff out there, you know? Astral traveling, channeling, all of this stuff. And I tend to either believe it’s bogus, or it’s for people with a psychic constitution considerably different from my own. Sometimes people say to me, “Well, these states that you’re talking about, can’t they be achieved without drugs?” And the answer to that is, my god, who would want to? What would be proved by achieving these things without drugs? If the things I’m talking about began to happen to me without drugs, I would be very, very concerned and alarmed! Because, you know, I just don’t—and also, I think there’s something to be said for admitting that we cannot do it alone. That if you want this spiritual insight, if you want the Gaian matrix to welcome you, then humble yourself to the point of making a deal with a plant. That’s the key. You can’t enter the bank without the key to the bank. The key to the bank is a plant. Jumping up and down outside the bank and exhorting the banker to recognize your inner worth and open the door is just not not going to do it.

Well, first of all, maybe we have to argue with your premise. You’re right that a lot of these so-called secondary, tertiary compounds are elaborated supposedly to make things taste bad, or so that birds will spit out things, and stuff like that. But, on the other hand, they studied this question fairly closely, and a lot of these alkaloids are produced specifically to attract animals, to bring them in to nectaries as pollinators and that sort of thing. Old style botany always believes these compounds are what’s called tertiary to metabolism, meaning they’re kind of like waste products and not very important garbage. But when you look carefully at a psychoactive plant, invariably what you see is that the psychoactive chemistry is going on where metabolism is most active. This is an indication that actually these things aren’t tertiary at all, they are doing something for the plant. But we don’t know what it is.

As to why they have this peculiar effect that they do in us: I think that’s because there was anciently, and over the evolutionary life of human beings, actually a connection between us and nature, and that these these drugs are the antenna, the switches, that switch us back towards the lógos of the natural world. I suspect that all of nature is a seamless web of pheromonally mediated connections and interactions, and that we are just not yet at a sufficient level of analysis and sophisticated observation to see this interconnected web. You know, our idea of nature is that it’s all tooth and claw: survival of the fittest and the devil takes the hindmost. The new version of evolution is entirely different. It says that the way you attain survival is by making yourself indispensable to everybody else. So it’s not by triumphing over the ecosystem, but by integrating yourself so thoroughly into it that it can’t function without you. Then you’re on your way to being a dominant species—not by crushing the opposition.

Let’s see how we’re doing here.

By deconstructionists I suppose you mean Jacques Derrida and that crowd. Well, I think deconstruction serves a very useful function. I think we’re unaware of how thoroughly language is a medium in which we swim, how thoroughly our world is built of language. In a way, the boundary-dissolving character of the plant hallucinogens is a dissolving of language barriers. They show you that the surface of reality was not the surface of reality, it was the surface of your local language, and now it’s gone, and here is what lies beneath it.

Interesting question. If we’re talking about psychoactive fungi, we’re severely limited by the fossil record, because no fossil mushroom has ever been found older than 40 million years. This is because mushrooms are very soft-bodied, ephemeral kind of things. As primary decomposers—which is what fungi are doing on this Earth—it’s reasonable to assume that they must have been here from the very beginning of the conquest of the land. But proof in the fossil record has not been forthcoming. Now, if we’re talking about higher plants, flowering plants—which is mostly what we’re talking about here—then no flowering plants existed before 65 million years ago. Flowering plants emerged out of the same catastrophe that destroyed the dinosaurs and set the stage for the emergence of the mammals.

This is something people don’t realize. Flowering plants are as recent as mammals. You know, if the period of life on Earth is visualized as a yardstick, the period of the flowering plants is the last inch and a half, and it’s also the rise of the mammals occurs in that last inch and a half. So before that, the plant life on the Earth was of a very different sort, and we know nothing about its chemistry.

I don’t know. If they could make a buck out of it? I don’t think they’re very interested in psychedelics. I don’t think any political—what?

1:44:51

McKenna

Except that they abandoned it. Yes, MK Ultra, for those of you who don’t know, stands for “mind control,” spelled the southern way. “Mind Kontrol Ultra” was a program the CIA pursued in the 1960s where they tried out all kinds of psychedelic drugs, and they also worked with it in combination with hypnosis. They were trying to make what they called the Trojan horse. This was somebody who would be an assassin, but not even know it. And how far they got with all of this we will never know, because of course it all disappears behind the walls of secrecy.

But the declassified history of the CIA and LSD is very interesting. Some of you may know the book Acid Dreams by Martin Lee. A fascinating history of the way the government tried and really failed, I think, to use psychedelics. The government’s initial approach to LSD was: this is great! This is a truth serum. We can give this to enemy agents, and they’ll tell us all we know. Well, a few months of following that path they decided: no, this is an obscurity drug. We can give this to our agents, and they can take it if they’re captured and no one can learn anything from it! And clearly this was not a fruitful path, either.

And I really don’t fault the government for this. After all, the government is in the business of being the government. I don’t think any institution can inculcate psychedelics into its own program, because psychedelics destroy institutions—all institutions. I mean, it’s like trying to move an acid around that corrodes whatever pipes you pour it through. Because the boundary-dissolving quality of psychedelics is precisely the quality that government is involved in resisting. Government builds up labels, hands out role models, explains how everything is, and this stuff just then melts that back into a primal chaos. So it’s pretty corrosive of any social values that don’t arise spontaneously out of biological organization. It’s anarchist. It’s the acid of anarchy, in a way.

Alright, we’re never going to get through this list, but it’s gratifying to know it’s here if we need it. Here’s a question about the time wave, which I’m going to skip because we’re not talking about the time wave today, and pity the poor soul who’s never heard of it.

1:48:08

McKenna

No, I don’t know a lot about herbal medicine and that sort of thing, but raising serotonin level as a treatment for depression seems like a pretty good strategy. I don’t know of herbs. Usually inhibition of serotonin is what’s going on. And with these psychedelics, they do compete with serotonin for the bond site. That what it’s all about at the atomic level, is: in the synaptic clefts of your neurons there are what are called receptors, and if you were to fly down and look at these things, they look like complex locks. There are hooks, protuberances, little drawers and fit in places. Well then, the drug molecule is carried into the synaptic cleft by the blood stream, and it seeks to what’s called occupy the bond site, or simply bond. And it’s trying to fit in. Well, the normal thing which fits in those bonding sites is serotonin. But some of these hallucinogens are much better fits than natural serotonin. They are what pharmacologists say “competitive” at the bond site. And so they literally elbow the serotonin out of the way, and then they fit themselves into the receptor. Well, once the receptor and its fit, its agonist, are in place, then the bioelectric field of the synapse can be activated. Well, if you swap out serotonin for an exotic molecule like harmine or mescaline or something like that, well, then this shifts the mode of this molecular-level electrical environment. And I believe that that is what then registers as a higher cortical experience that we call the trip. It’s the experience of hundreds of millions of these introduced molecules displacing the normal serotonin, and then broadcasting this signal in a slightly different way than it is normally perceived. So there’s a molecular connection, there’s a connection down into the molecular level.

This will be our last one this morning.

1:51:13

McKenna

Yeah, and we might talk about that a little this afternoon. I sort of alluded to it this morning. My idea is that language is a process that is half completed in us as we sit here, and that language is really something which wants to be seen, not heard, but that we are on our way to evolving toward this visible language. And we currently are operating with the somewhat substandard acoustical codes. And I think, in a way, history is the process of getting out, revealing, defining, refining this natural language. The place where the psychedelics impact upon us as social creatures is the language domain. I mean, you may have tremendous hierophanies and breakthroughs, but if you can’t talk about it or paint about it or dance about it, or in any way communicate it to anybody, then it is not efficacious for the species, it’s just your private entertainment. So the domain of language is where the collective impact is coming. And one of the things I think about psychedelics is that they are probably capable of helping us force the evolution of language, because we cannot move into the future any faster than our language of description for the future. So if we’re interested in streamlining culture and getting away from this sort of random lock style of cultural evolution, then we have to look at rationally interfacing with the evolution of language. And maybe we can talk about that when we come back.

Thanks very much!

—you this morning was sort of an intro in case people needed to be brought up to speed.

We discussed, basically, the distribution of these psychoactive plants with a history of shamanic use, and then discussed a little bit about the history of them, and I didn’t really finish with that, because I want to stress that this—I think what we talked about this morning is: we got them all to a good place. We got them all to paradise in Africa with clear vision, much food, and plenty of horsing around, and then we broke for lunch. The forces that created that partnership society in prehistory, the forces that allowed the emergence of a non-male dominant social style, were the same forces which then eventually destroyed it as well. Because it was nothing more than climatological change, is what was happening.

As the African continent became drier, the grasslands retreated, the water holes became less frequent and further apart, and the mushroom came under pressure because of increased dryness. And at that point, I think, probably the mushroom festivals became less and less frequent. The whole thing became more tenuous, and there was great pressure, then, to try and figure out how to preserve the mushrooms through the dry times of the year to have them available for ceremonies. And I think that it’s the use of honey as a preservative that really set the stage for things to go wrong. Because honey turns into a psychedelic compound on its own if you do nothing to it but leave it alone. It ferments. It becomes mead, and mead is a primitive kind of alcoholic beverage. So, over several millennia, what began as an ecstatic mushroom cult turned into a beer cult: a cult of alcoholic intoxication. And then you get the same shift of ratios that you see in our own society. I mean, how many women in our own society have their first sexual experiences in an atmosphere of alcohol abuse and misuse? The two almost go together—less in the twentieth century; before the twentieth century, it’s almost possible to imagine nobody got laid for a thousand years in the West without being pretty juiced up because it was pretty unappetizing, I imagine. So this is a way in which sensory modalities and emphasis on different aspects of psyche change over time without a culture even being aware of it.

And then I talked this morning a little bit about the fall into history: the neurotic dysfunctionalism that characterizes historical existence. And I think it’s worth going back to that, because some people have the idea that psychedelics are a kind of instant psychotherapy and that they address the concerns of the individual, but they’re not concerned to link it up to history to see what it was for us in the past, and what its absence has done for us. I think that the whole phenomenon that we call the fall into history is the scenario of abandonment that we underwent as we broke the umbilical connection to the Gaian matrix of organic life. That’s what we were embedded in, in this African context. But when Africa dried up, and we moved out of Africa and into the Middle East, we then were transformed from nomadic pastoralists into primitive agriculturists, and then later city-builders, and the entire pattern of male dominance and anxiety is set in place.

If you look at the world of 7000 BC, the most sophisticated human structure on the Earth (of, let’s say, 7500 BC) is at Jericho, in what is now Palestine. And what is it? It’s a grain storage tower, built at Jericho 7200 to 7500 BC. It indicates that the primitive pastoral nomadic form has given way, now, to an agricultural form that allows for the accumulation of surplus, and hence the need to defend same, and hence the establishment of have and have-not psychology, and so forth and so on. So all of the institutions that we now must attempt to reform and grapple with began then: urbanization, kingship, male dominance, representative politics—all of these things begin then, and are further exacerbated 2,000 or 3,000 years later by the Western decision to go with the phonetic alphabet as a method of communication.

See, a phonetic alphabet further removes you away from anything concrete or real or related to nature. There’s no ideogram, there’s no glyph, there isn’t even rebus. There’s simply an abstract symbol which stands for a sound. I mean, this is about as far away from the hands-on approach of language that you could get. Well, the culture that made these decisions—which is our culture; the culture of Europe and the ancient Middle East—has evolved into the dominant culture on the planet, and has put in place institutions like science and so forth and so on. Our metaphors have grown ever more cogent in their ability to manipulate matter and energy as they have evolved less and less relevance to ourselves. So now we have ideological systems of tremendous power that none of us can understand or relate to—which is kind of an odd relationship to knowledge, since knowledge is supposed to be an experience of empowerment, not an experiment of disempowerment. But our society has done it differently. And so we all wander around with a sense of disempowerment because we’re surrounded by accomplishments that we couldn’t possibly duplicate.

Well, I mention all this because I think that it shows where the solution lies. If we were in balance 15,000 years ago, and it was achieved through the use of psychedelics, de-emphasis of the ego, non-existence of the nuclear family, and the suppression of the concept of ownership, we should look at these as possible styles of existence that might be put in place in the future. That’s the psychedelic society that you’ve heard me talk about at various times.

Well, that’s probably enough on that. Oh, you thought so too! When I said we’d look at the geographical distribution, the history, and then the phenomenology, I thought that we would put most of the phenomenology of the thing in here in this section, because it is important to establish just what we’re talking about—and also to empower people to describe their own experiences, which are often so peculiar that, unless there is a group such as this, a person tends to just define themselves as starkers. I mean, what else can you say about some of this? But, you know, if you’re starkers and you get ten people to agree with you, you’re not starkers anymore, you’re a movement.

So I mentioned this morning DMT, and I made of it a kind of paradigmatic compound because it’s so brief, so natural, so powerful, so quick to recover from. And it’s also a very good paradigmatic case when talking about what the psychedelic experience is like to have, because I think if you have the DMT experience, on the way to the center of that flash, you’ll probably have all the other ones. It seems to lie at the center of the mandala.

The most startling thing about the DMT flash—and I mentioned this this morning, when we were talking about Jung—is how astonishing it is. That death by astonishment seems the major danger. And this is even if you’re an art historian, a Jungian, an aficionado of symbols, and so forth and so on. It seems to come from some dimension orthogonal to the human world. And it is not a unitary experience, the way the famous white light and all these others wordless, indescribable, elusive, mercurial things are. It isn’t like that at all. It’s extremely multiplistic, and it’s extremely specific in its presentation. I mean, when you smoke DMT, you have the feeling that you have burst into a place; that you have not had a psychological experience, you are not having a mental experience, you have burst into some kind of a space. And within that space, the first shock is that it’s inhabited.

And this is the shock I’ve never recovered from, because it was just the last thing I expected to find inside a chemical compound was the equivalent of a Bugs Bunny cartoon. It is inhabited by entities, is the only word to describe them. And they are—as I’ve said many times—they are like jeweled self-dribbling basketballs. And there are many of them. And they come out of the background, and they present themselves to you. They’re literally vibrating up and down with excitement. They’re faceted and rotating. And they see you as clearly as you see them. they even greet you. Some of you may recall the old Pink Floyd song: “The gnomes have learned a new way to say hooorayyy.” I think it’s on Piper at the Gates of Dawn. It’s the first album. Those Floyd fans were looking puzzled—it’s because it was forty years ago, or something!

Anyway, as you burst into this space, the gnomes say, “Hooray!” And they present themselves, and they are truly the gnomes of central European fairy tales: archetypal gnomes. They’re very humorous. They’re very mercurial and delightful. But I think it’s Jung who warns against the humor of the spirit mercurious, because it can turn on you. It’s not a friendly humor. It’s too crazy, too many plates are being thrown, too many cars are exploding. It’s like a Marx Brothers cartoon that hovers just on the edge of changing from mayhem to mania, you know? Very intense. And the most striking to me, and really the motivation for my career, is: they are displaying new models of language that have never been seen before. They sing. And out of their singing, elven chatter condense objects which look like nothing at all in this world. I mean, the closest I’ve been able to come to them are the eggs of Fabergé. You know, these constructs in sapphire and ivory and crystal and vitreous glass that the French designer Fabergé created. Well, these things are like that, but they’re like that raised to some excruciating pinnacle of completion. Because as they show you these objects, you know beyond any possibility of contravention that if a single one of these objects were to exist in this world, it would change this world forever. If a single one of these objects were to exist in this world, we would spend a thousand years studying this object. The last time this happened was a guy who gave a speech up on a hill about moral obligation. We studied it for a thousand years. This is the same kind of thing.

And these Fabergé hyper-dimensional objects are themselves undergoing a dynamic transformation. They’re not static objects like the Fabergé eggs, they are undergoing changes: singing, condensing other objects. These objects are crawling all over the ground in front of you, clamoring for your attention. Now remember: twelve seconds before, you were sitting in a suburban living room somewhere, grappling with some drug somebody wanted you to take. Now all that’s gone, and here are these things. I call them tykes, because I wanted to capture the sense of their childlike-ness. I don’t know why I call them tykes, actually. It just seemed like the appropriate thing. If some of you are classicists or students of the literature of pre-Socratic philosophers, you might recall the fifty-second Fragment of Heraclitus, which says, “The Aion is a child at play with colored balls.” The Aion is a child at play with colored balls.

And when you break your way into the presence of the Aion, it’s extremely—I don’t know. It’s upsetting. You can’t believe it’s happening. There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance. You could believe this if it just weren’t happening to you. And there is this tremendous affection and interesting humanity. And then there is urgency—a lot of urgency. The tykes want to initiate you. They have a message. And the message is: you can do what we are doing. And what they’re doing is using their voices to make physical objects condense out of the air. And they’re saying, “You can do this! Do it! Do it! DO IT!” And they’re on you. And they jump in and out of your chest—which is something that is described in the Amazon, too; the hiculay in the tryptamine snuff cults of the Yanomamo. They jump in and out of your chest. And they’re saying, “Do this thing. Do it, do it. Suspend your belief.” And eventually you do do it. You discover that you can drop the filter of meaning, that your voice can move back several registers, and out comes elf chatter. And this elf chatter is able to wring the air in front of you like a washcloth and get alchemical gold to drip out of the air, and to begin to condense in front of you.

Well, by this time, most people would like to call time out so they can make phone calls to various philosophers. But there’s no time out, it just keeps going. And these things have a very—the aura of strangeness, of alienness, is palpable. There’s an emotion in there that we just don’t have in this world. Because it’s composed of unbelievable alienness in the presence of unbelievable familiarity. It’s an ecstasy that is a coincidentia oppositorum. Simultaneously it is both what it is and what it is not. And the human mind can’t handle that. That’s called cognitive dissonance, and you just go into a conniption fit of some sort.

Well, the very first time I smoked DMT in 1967 with absolutely no expectation, this happened to me, and it has happened every time since. And then I’ve had occasion to observe people taking DMT in countries where it’s legal, and what I see is: there is an archetype which surrounds DMT, which you must make your way through it. But at the center of the archetype, the archetype is not present, and only the alien is present. The archetype is that of the circus or the carnival. The carnival.

Think for a moment about the carnival. It has two aspects. One is blazing light and activity at the center of the triple ring—the lady in the spangled costume is high above the main floor, and the lions and the tigers and the clowns are parading around. That’s part of it. But it has another aspect. Just off to the side of the big tent there are the side shows—the hoochie-coochie dancers, the two-headed man, and so forth and so on. In other words, there’s this kinky peculiar shadow side of it. And I often—if any of you are fans of the films of Federico Fellini, here’s a man who understood the archetype of the circus. And how, if you remember in Amarcord, that circus. Or if you remember Giulietta degli spiriti, the flaming doorway into the room with the bed with the bed springs and the crate paper flames. These are carnival images that relate back to DMT. When you finally come into the center of it, these are seen to be veils. It veils itself that way, because it’s the old candy-to-the-baby routine. It treats us as people who would like to go to the circus, and then it takes us to the circus—but then there is a revelation beyond that.

And I don’t know how many people present in this room have confronted the thing I’m talking about. I always, at this moment, am aware that some people are saying, “My, doesn’t he perfectly get it!” and other people are saying “Huh? What is this? What is this guy talking about?” The point I want to make is: it’s real. It’s not vague, you don’t have to strain for it, nobody wonders whether or not it happened to them. It’s just like somebody walking up to you, and taking you by the arm, and saying, “There’s something I insist on showing you. Come this way, please.” And I am very—it was the presence of the entities that shattered the person who I was. Because I was a scientific rationalist, a reductionist. I had no no room for elves in my cosmology—and here they were, hundreds of them.

So it seems to me that this is a central question that shamanism has always dealt with; perhaps not with the kind of ontological sophistication hat we imagine ourselves to have, but this is the question that must be asked: who’s in there? Who is this? There are at least 3 possibilities, and I’m not sure which is the most conservative. The first possibility is that we don’t understand how the world is constructed, and that, in fact, there is a parallel universe running alongside of ours full of elves who use a language to make objects. And then: why you can burst through to this place on this one drug? You know, and then each explanation raises a lot of questions. And then, the other possibility is—this is the Jungian possibility. And I can’t remember which one it was, but one of the later things… he talks about these elves; because of the Cabeiri. The Cabeiri are the alchemical children that appear in act three of Faust that Jung spent a lot of time on these alchemical Cabeiri, and the question of the homunculus. And he says in one place, I think he says—he describes them as autonomous psychic elements that have escaped from the control of the ego. This is a weird way to go about it. I mean, it’s probably an accurate description, but how much does it tell us, you know? It means that the psyche is to be visualized as a half gallon of mercury? And when we throw it on the floor, the mercury balls up and spreads everywhere, and each ball of mercury you look at, by gad, it has a little face looking back at you! That’s because mercury is a mirrored surface: you’re looking at your own psyche shattered into thousands of pieces around you.

Another possibility, and one I leaned toward for years—and I still lean toward, because I’ve noticed the radical nature of your explanation diminishes with the distance since the last time you smoked DMT. The longer it’s been, the more likely you are to have some humdrum notion that you can pour it into. So the humdrum notion that I settled on was: well, clearly these are just extraterrestrials. They don’t come in silver ships demanding to be taken to the national defense agency. This is how they come. Why they come this way—who knows! They’re coming through mind. Mind is the medium in which they travel. Where do they come from? Who knows. Can it even be located in the Newtonian spacetime matrix? I mean, what do you want here? A star catalog number? Would that satisfy you?

And then, finally—and I think I’ve exceeded my number of possible explanations—and then, finally, the explanation which is my current favorite. It’s a little disturbing, and I haven’t quite figured out what to do with it, but I have a sense we’re on the right track here. The reason the DMT space feels so peculiar, both alien and excruciatingly familiar, is because these things in this other place represent what I call an ecology of souls. This place is the one place you never thought you were going to make a visit to, and come back to chat it around the coffee maker. They’re dead, that’s who these things are. This is the realm of the dead. Well, I have to confess, in all of my psychedelic voyaging and idea-mongering, and all of that, I never was able to go that far, to reach that far in my imagination. It sort of had to be presented to me. But if you go to shamans worldwide and talk to them about their spirit helpers, and say, you know, “What’s the deal with this? Who are these things?” they say, “Well, these are the ancestors. Didn’t you know? These are the ancestors.” It’s perfectly cut and dried and normal.

I had an occasion—I won’t use his name to embarrass him—but I had occasion to expose a very well known Tibetan high mucky-muck to DMT. And he said after he took it like a man, said afterwards, “That is the lesser lights.” That is the lesser lights. And if any of you are students of Mahayana Buddhism, you know that the lesser lights are the lights you see at the edge of the bardo: as you start in to the 42-day process of dying, you encounter the lesser lights. This guy was saying to me, “You cannot go further in the body and have any expectation of returning.” In other words, once you have seen the lesser lights, you have stretched the umbilicus to matter to the breaking point. If you go one step further, it’s eternity for you.

Well, I don’t know how I feel about this. The head tyke, I’ve had to then ask myself, the head tyke—is that me? Do you actually encounter your dead soul? Is there a dimensions where you are both simultaneously both dead and alive, both simultaneously witness and observer? I don’t know, but I certainly think that if we’re going to use a conservative explanation for these things, the only theory more conservative then that they are dead people is the theory that says that they are nothing whatsoever. And that just simply will not serve.

I think it would come as a tremendous surprise to twentieth-century civilization if, orthogonal to all our expectations of spaceflight and virtual reality and all this techno-shmechno stuff that we’re lining up in front of us, that there would be a broadside from ninety degrees out of the unexpected, and it would be a doorway swinging open into the realms beyond organic existence. I resisted this fiercely, but I just don’t know what we’re going to do with these DMT creatures if we don’t try to find a rational explanation. And any rational explanation will be exotic, because the facts of the matter are exotic. Those of you who have not had this experience, who are sitting there thinking “It would never happen to me,” you’re full of it! It will happen to you. This doesn’t require the willful suspension of disbelief, this doesn’t require a pure heart or dietary prescription. No, this is part of the human birthright. And the fact that we deny the existence of a non-human entity, entelechy, intelligence on this planet is just part of our heritage from rationalism.

And, you know, you don’t have to take it very seriously. Because rationalism—the philosophy that gives us permission to deny the invisible world—you know who founded the philosophy off rational materialism? Any takers? Aristotle was early. I think I’d give credit to René Descartes for modern materialism and rationalism. Well, you know who told René Descartes to found rationalism and materialism? An angel! Are you ready for this? This is a suppressed history episode in the history of human thought. Here are the facts, folks. 1619: René Descartes is twenty-one years old. He’s a young Frenchman in search of adventure. He joins a Hapsburg army that is going off to Prague to lay siege to Prague to put down an alchemical revolt there. They kick butt on these alchemists, win the war, and they’re on their way back to France. And in September 1619, this french army camped at Ulm in southern Germany. Some of you may know Ulm as Einstein’s home town. And, in fact, that figures in our story—obliquely, as you will see. This French army camps at Ulm, and René Descartes hits the hay, and in the middle of the night an angel appears to this young man in the radiance of his rooms and says, “The mastery of nature is to be achieved through number and measure.” Modern science is founded, folks—right there, right then, by an angel. So, you know, how far away are the informing voices? How rational is rationalism? How material is materialism?

All of you must know, I’m sure, the famous story of Kekulé, the German chemist Kekulé, who discovered the benzene ring. He was struggling with this problem in physical chemistry, could not figure it out, fell asleep in his study, and the ouroboric serpent appeared before him in his dream and took its tail in its mouth. And he came out of sound sleep and said, “I’ve got it!” He walked to the blackboard and he drew the first benzene ring. Angelic intervention. Intervention from the unconscious.

So the point of all of this is to suggest that human history is completely interpenetrated by the peculiar, the non-human, that which has intentionality and affection for mankind, for humanity. And this is what shamans call to their aid. This is how the curing is done. It’s done through these spirit helpers, they’re called; elementals. And, so far as I know, Jungianism is the only modern intellectual position where you can even raise this issue without having a net dropped over you. I mean, this is absolutely forbidden by the modern world view. And yet, it lies very, very close to the surface in our culture.

I mean, as an example of how close to the surface it lies in our culture, consider for a moment Santa Claus. What’s this about? Santa Claus is the master of the elves. The elves that he is master of are demon artificers: they make toys for the world’s children in their vast underground toy shops. And where are these underground toy shops? At the north pole. I don’t have to tell a room full of Jungians that the north pole is the axis mundi, Yggdrasil, the magic world ash, the center of the mandala. What are the colors of Santa Claus? Red and white, the colors of Amanita muscaria. Absolutely! What is the titulary animal of Santa Claus? Reindeer. Reindeer are very central to the Amanita muscaria cult, because reindeer eat the mushroom and then excrete their urine, and this is thought to be a cleaner and easier way to take the mushroom than to take it on the so-called first pass. The second pass is after the reindeer have had it.

Just an anecdotal aside, if you’re ever in the Yakut Basin, one of the great perils of the intoxicated Amanita user is to crawl out of the yurt in the middle of the night to take a leak in the snow, and before you can back off, the reindeer come and knock you headlong, because they want to get to this Amanita-flavored snow.

So here is Santa Claus, right in the center of our culture, and when you take it apart, all the motifs are there. The demon artificers, the elves, the cosmic axis, the magical flight. It’s a beautiful example of the preservation of pagan psychedelic use into a modern context.

What can we say about this? Oh, well, I know one more thing I wanted to say about it. That this program that these tykes are pushing is a language skills program. And we don’t know how long people have been bursting into this place. This may be the source of language. You know, where did language come from? We learned it from elves in hyperspace is as good a possibility as any other. And this is still ongoing, this language reformation program. They want us to activate our language-forming ability. And language is the DMT flash, as I said this morning, it’s something beheld. Syntax is something potentially to be looked at, not to be heard. And we don’t understand this, because for us language is something that you hear. We can’t imagine a language that you see. But have you ever noticed the way in which we preserve clarity of intention in language with verbal metaphors? We say, “I see what you mean.” “He painted a picture.” It means we unconsciously believe that truth will be beheld.

And some of you who are students of the ancient literature may know Philo Judaeus, a Hellenistic Alexandrian jew, absolute contemporary of Christ, born before, died after. And in one of his treatises on the lógos, which he was always talking about, Philo Judaeus presents an etymology of the word Israel, talking about the word Israel. And he says, “Israel means ‘he who sees God.’ This is this meaning of the word Israel.” And then he goes on to say—this “he who sees god,” he’s talking about that—and he says, “What would be the more perfect lógos?” Now, I should assume most of you know the lógos was an informing voice, a voice in the head, which was the sine qua non of Alexandrian spirituality. Socrates had it, Plato had it. The lógos. So Philo Judaeus asked, “what would be the more perfect lógos?” And then he answers his own question. He says, “The more perfect lógos would go from being heard to being beheld without ever crossing over a noticeable moment of transition.”

Well, that is precisely what you encounter in deep psychedelic experiences and the DMT flash. You behold the lógos. In the initiation of experience, you don’t behold it, you hear it. It sounds (in Michael Harner’s wonderful phrase) like the sound of rushing water, or like the sound of tinkling bells, and it’s very far away. And then it begins to come closer, you can you can, you vein to forma picture of it in your minds in the way you would of a napoly marching band that you just heard it about a half-mile away and the pa pa pa is getting bigger, coming closer. this is the elf parade. and when it finally comes into view it actually goes without ever passing over a noticeable moment of transition from being heard to being seen. through the phenomenon of approach. you hear it before you see it then you see it far away then you see it very close. and when you see it very close it who cares what it sounds like because you’re see ing it. this more perfect logos is what the tyk’s the spiritual helpers want to teach. and I think that it’s import ant to spend a little time on this because I think this would have tremendous historical impact upon our situation if we could by hook or by crook create a a more visible logos, a language which could be seen. You probably all considered at some time or another, what would telepathy be like? and I think most people answer that question by thinking telepathy would be for me to hear what you think, but how would it be telepathy worth for me to see what you mean. that’s telepathy. it put’s you in the other guys shoes. if you stand in the other persons shoes you are the other person. to have a persons point of view is to be that person in regard to that single atom of experience. so I’ve spent time with virtual reality people, and all these technical folks, because I think visual language is something that wants to be born. and it may be that it is—can be technologically coaxed into existence, that we’re gonna have to wear goggles or have fast computers. or it may be that it can be physiologically coxed into existence. there may be drugs which shift the processing of language from being an auditory phenomenon to being a visible phenomena. ayahuasca is an excellent candidate for this.uh if you spend time with the ayahuasca taking populations in the Amazon, there’s great stress in these populations on acquiring what’s called an icaro icaro means magical song. and the icaro is a spontaneous chant like song which comes to you during the intoxication. the thing that’s interesting about these icaros is that they are critiqued as visual objects, not as sound. people never say of an icaro, it sounded beautify. they allays say it looked lovely. and then people will say, but there should have been more blue (laughter) this kind of thing, it’s clearly being criticized as a visual modality. well I think that these ayahuasca using people are at the cutting edge of evolution. 2:37:40 they are forcing the evolution of the modality of language. it may be that the processing of language is not hard wired not physiologically wired. it’s software function, having to do with culture, language, upbringing and so forth. because some people claim they are grade visualizers and they do think visually and so forth and we have no reason to deny this so it amy be that we are just a one gene, or even an expression of gene ratio’s different away from an entirely different way from processing communication between each other. and this is what the new age, the end of history, the anticipation of this great breakthrough that we can feel but not really outline is about. if that seems far fetched to you, you should notice how far fetched the original emergence must have been. because I think people were fully people and totally mute and you know unable to articulate a thought. and then either an accumulation of neuro’s or some synergistic effects was brought into play and low and behold spoken language emerged out of that. well something similar could happen to us. in the morning session I talked about the forced evolution of language, paying attention to our language. I really think that the way to think of these psychedelics is as catalysts for the imagination. if any of you are chemists you know that a catalyst is something that when you add it to a chemical process, the process is tremendously speeded up, but in the end the catalyst is not destroyed. the catalyst is reconstituted at the end. so psychedelics, one way of thinking of them, is as a catalyst for cognition. the original description of psychedelic drugs was that they were consciousness expanding drugs. well if we take the idea that they are consciousness expanding seriously for even a moment then we have to put a lot of attention in on this because it’s the absence of consciousness that is murdering us and our planet. we need all the consciousness that we can get, we need to reign it out of computers, get it out of plants, raise it in ourselves and children. wherever we can get it, we need it and the present, you know the present situation with the planet is very dire. very dire because of us. our unchecked evolution in a single direction along the gradient of culture has now created a toxic planet that is an endangered planet. uh. since this situation has arisen entirely within the confines of history aren’t we going to have to look outside of history in order to redress this problem, I think so. and when we do look outside history, then we find the institution of plant shamanism there, waiting to inform us, to educate us, and to show us how to set a course out of the present dilemma. I don’t think we can find our way out by ourselves. I don’t think we can get high by ourselves and I don’t think as a species that we can save the planet by ourselves. we have to have a partner. we have to get an ally into this situation. just in closing and as an example, the mushroom as a tremendous problem solving ability. and because we can talk to it, we can ask it questions. we can actually get a non-human perspective on human problems. a few weeks ago I made this statement before a group of people somewhere, and after the talk was over, somebody came up to me and said well why don’t you ask the mushroom how to save the world? and I just put it off, thought it was the wrong attitude, but then later I wondered about this questions, how to save the world. and I thought maybe I’ve been to circumspect with the mushroom maybe I should just put it to it. so I carried out the experiment. and put to them, how do we save the world. Now I don’t offer the solution, I’m going to tell you the mushrooms answer. so you can see how our backs aren’t quite to the walls yet. there’s still avenues to be explore. I said to the mushroom "how can we save the world" there was a hesitation of 1/3 of a second approximately. and then the mushroom said, no woman should raise more than one natural child. and I said, "what?" said no woman should raise more than one natural child. so I took that home with me and I thought about it, here are the consequences following that piece of advice. the population of the earth would be cut in half in 60-years. fifty years fallowing that it would be cut in half again, 50 years after that in half again. in 1 hundred and 50 years the population of the earth could be under a billion people. nobody was shot, no wars were fought. no one was told they could not have a child. no one was coerced, no one was starved. um. then I started looking into this thing about children and population. and most of you, like me. probably imagined that the world has a population problem. and this population problem is going on in places like Pakistan and Bangladesh and god dangit those little brown people will just not stop having children well I looked into it and i’ev got a surprise for you a child born in America will use between 600- and one thousand times more natural resources and energy than a child forn to a woman in Bangladesh. Suppose you went to Bangladesh and you met a woman,a young woman of child bearing age, and she told you that her ambition in life was to have a thousand children. you’d be appalled, I mean what kind of social responsibility is this, what kind of a person are you that you want to do this. an American woman having one child is having the equivalent of those thousand infants. now another interesting thing about this suggestion made by the mushroom. that each woman should rear one natural child. when we think of population control schemes, the first objection is "my god you can never sell this to people, they have these religions they have these centuries and so forth they just won’t watch" notice that what the mushroom suggested is most likely to be accepted by the person most important to convert. we don’t want to convert the woman of the backstreet of Bangladesh to this policy. we want to convert the woman of sherman oak, malibu, pandemoniac, gross point, boston, Philadelphia. because these are the woman whose children are using the resources. so here’s in one sentence. the mushroom was able to answer a question I put to it, with a suggestion I had never dreamed of, that seems at first glance a way to stand up pretty well. and I’ve spent a lifetime trying to figure out ways to solve this proble, see we’re a little stupid, because we’re all alike. Something years ago the mushroom said to me which deals with this was people are always—this question of enlightenment, and the mushroom said for one human being to expect to obtain enlightenment from another is like a grain of sand on the beach expecting to attain enlightenment from another grain of sand on the beach. don’t you get it, you’re all grains of sand. I mean joe shmo who runs a body shop and mookdaruby baba are the same people. there’s no difference between these guys, no reason to assume so. uh so I think we need help and that little exercising what do you do about the population problem shows that there are suggestions out there that we haven’t thought of, avenues that we haven’t tried. when I thought about why we haven’t we tried this avenue of one woman one natural child it took me about thirty seconds to understand that its real hard to make a buck in this situation when population is retracting at a rate of fifty-percent per generation. and our whole world is based on making a buck. I told this idea to someone and they said, but if the woman of Malibu stop having children they will lose all their political power. because political power is numerical. this is not true. political power is power. and if the woman of malibu stop having children they will be quite a bit wealthier than they already are. notice that this deciding to voluntarily have one natural child is also very helpful to you personally. that a woman will have to work less hard. will shave to cut fewer deals with the in place structure of male dominance if she was only one child. a woman with two children has got to cut a deal with male dominance or she has a trust fund or something the reason we are I think instinct—we have a tendency to clench at a suggestion and not follow it through, is because we imagine there is something holy and sacred about the nuclear family and that we don’t want to attack this biological unit that has such integrity. but this is a bunch of nonsense, the nuclear family has no biological integrity whatsoever, it’s a creation of the post industrial reformation. the extended family is the natural human unit to ease the pressure child-rearing on young woman. and to give everybody the benefit of contact inter-generational contact and so forth. no this nuclear family that our politicians are always beating their breath about, is the absolute caldron of neurosis in this society as far as I can see. and when you look at the demographics about what is happening, the number of house holds that are one woman one child household I think you can see that maybe our unconscious has already been in communication with the mushroom and it’s just the ego that’s gonna get the news last. well I don’t want to spend too much time on that but it’s an example of how these things offer solution to human problems. and if it can offer solutions to a human problem like over-population by six billion people on a planet, then it can surely take care of the needs and concerns of a group of rainforest hunter gatherers that number 70 or so people. I doubt that they can conceive of a question that doesn’t have an answer to, because it can operate on many levels, simultaneously. and this is an example of consciousness in action, you see—me plus nothing had nothing new to say about the population problem, me plus psilocybin had a whole new take, a suggestion. we can slaughter it down and ultimately decide it’s a bunch of larch but at least there was a new thought a new try a new hope. this is the consequences of consciousness. and we’re beset by problems like this, and we shouldn’t assume that they are insoluble simple because we haven’t solved them intact we must assume they are solvable otherwise we are not gonna have a place to hang our hat in fifty years. but the solution comes through a act of humility, an act of opening to the dynamic of nature, the feminine, the psyche, the ego is the calcarious knot, tumorous tissue that stands outside of all that. it cannot be trusted, it cannot be relied upon. and so by attempting to dissolve that, to mitigate it’s hard edges, to smooth it out into the greater context of being, then we really discover what humanness is about because humanness is not something that an be encompassed form the point of view from the ego that’s why creating the ultimately egoist society we created a society with so little humanity in it you know and I see the psychedelics as a—an—make the world a better place then as we found it which is certainly not our record so far but it’s not too late, I mean HG wells called history a race between education and disaster it’s not mere coincidence nor even mere synchronicity that at this moment in time and space with these tremendous crisis bearing down upon us that we have reached out to the archaic peoples with a new attitude, not an attitude of how can we enslave them, but how can we learn from them. and my hope is that here in the final kicking of the clock of history, we are going to end our prodigal decent into the desert world of the ego, and return with what we have learned. the fruits of the prodigal journeying of the evan son which is what history has been. return with the fruits of that prodigal wandering to the larger human family that waits on us in the rain forests, in the deserts, in the marshes in the thorn forests of this planet. the archaic people are waiting for us to get on the train and then the train will be able to be part. but we have to awaken to our past and then we can set a course toward a meaningful future. that’s the rap!