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 young and McLuhan and illion
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 young of course talked about print and
Manuscript and electronic culture. He did not talk about drugs, but drugs are a form of media
because they
information travels through the drug to the mind that's a medium of communication and
various societies where drugs
Like clothing with no awareness of their existence at all somewhat in the way of the de fish to water
So that for instance if you're in Dublin, you are swimming in the ambience of an alcohol
culture
You don't have to be drunk to be in Dublin although it helps
but the the entire society is promised on the
Possibility you see the entire society is promised on the possibility in India
the entire society is promised on the possibility of
hashish
intoxication 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
you know, 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 admits 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 and 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 blacks on the serration, but the 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 derived of the boundary dissolving
numinous
Encounter with the vegetable mind
So a lot of the cultural problems we're 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
as you move south from Europe into the continent of
human origins
Africa you discovered that while Africa supports a tropical
Ecosystem which because that means increased speciation of plan
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 that 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 hallasan engines 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 interests 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 tabernae the iboga the so called boa tea cults of zyre 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 freak out
it's 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 actually have 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 that chemical which would impel you to want to have sex?
There's nothing quite like that
except this tavern antha 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 a as a kind of a
Cold
Thing I think but when you talk to these people who are taking ebo game, 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 bowie tea cult and they achieve it and
They achieve it
And it allows them to resist cultural incursions by Christian
missionaries Bowie tea is
the main cultural force
That is holding back
conversion to Christianity by these people
Fang culture the people who are using this evil game. It's an interesting culture it there's a great deal of anxiety
in
Fang culture about divorce
Because 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 eople game
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 ayahuasca, we will see I mean when we reach South America
We will see ayahuasca
functioning not as an aphrodisiac or a thing to unify chuckles 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 of the possible
Evolutionary impact of hallucinogens will see that it always lies in the direction of these
collectivized states of mind and
Dissolution of boundaries
Between people other than tabernac the iboga
Africa's Hollis antigens 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 20th century, we always smoked our cannabis in the 18th and 19th
century cannabis was eaten and
Jellied forms of cannabis that were eaten judging by the prose of people like Theodore Gautier
Baudelaire
It's Hugh Ludlow and people like that. It was as powerful as LSD without doubt
I mean, these people were being swept in type 2 Titanic Li alien
dimensions well when we cross from 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 RIC Vedas and
Mandala nine of the Rig Veda is an entirely ahem - 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
literature's 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
Rob Gordon Wasson, who
Some of you may know as the discoverer the modern discoverer of the mushroom cults of Mexico
founder of the science of ethno mycology
Believed to his dying breath that soma was aa Moneta
muscaria the red topped white
speckled Amanita
This is a mushroom, which has a major role in Tunguska can Arctic
shamanism
But to say as Wasson did that this is the supreme and thean of all time
Is not supported by the evidence, I think
Wasson zone efforts to become
Intoxicated on I'm Annina. Muscaria were not successful
My effort have not been successful
Occasionally you will hear anecdotal evidence
someone will tell a story about eating a banana muscaria that obviously they had a
staggering breakthrough to a rupture of plane as Mercy Leone in his wonderful phrase
But it's extremely undependable
and when you look at the botany of how many know muscaria you discover that it's chemical constituency is
seasonally variant
genetically
variant
Geographically
variant and so forth so
often I think as we gain an understanding of a given
shamanism, we will see that it depended on an extremely deep local knowledge and if you take what
Ayacucho Minh says about how many know muscaria an attempt to apply it in the national forests of New Mexico
You know you could end up with a tag on your toe
These things do this kind of information doesn't travel well
One of the one of the you know, there are old shamans and bold shamans, but there are no old bold
In looking at the indian sub-continent for other hallucinogens
That may have made a contribution
The obvious one to my mind is stropharia
cubensis that mushroom which grows in the dung of cows and that the book my brother and I was
wrote was about
other possibilities some of you may know that there are a family of the argyria family of
morning-glories an Asian family of morning-glories distributed from India to the sought to
Micronesia
13 species all containing
psychoactive ergot alkaloids none
With an 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 our jury and nervosa is a perfect example
Because you take the seeds the seeds or 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 of 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 phyto chemists in the Midwest
Discovered a new plant. It's always been there. Nobody's ever taken it very seriously treated it like a weed
desmond --this
illinois ANSYS the illinois bundle weed
This is suggestive that it's called bundle weed because a medicine bundle is of course a shamans
Mojo bag, you know but so bundle weed
6% by dry weight and then 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 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
a
Papaver summon a forum the opium poppy
With cannabis, this is probably the oldest human
narcotic known
In the the later phase of Minoan civilization and was entirely based on
opium on the use of opium and in fact when Michael Ventris
Translated the tablets 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 out they realized no in tho 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
anesthetize
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 Asia 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 at
elusive and
and other cults sites it was said by the by the
commentators contemporary commentators of the Hellenistic world the site the the rites
practiced in secret Atta lusus are practiced in
Public at canosa and this this was the difference, you know the going underground of the old
protamine known 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
virulent, ly addictive substance opium was not even noticed to be addictive by anybody until
1627 when the English physician John Playfair for the first time
commented that
Opium once taken over a long period of time then that would be a requirement that it be taken
throughout life
We're right in the 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. 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 I 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 continent is similarly poor in Hollis antigens
there are no
very interesting hallucinogens in North America and North American Indians North American culture
Did not avail itself of this
Ecstatic plant induced chauvinism attended more to go for what's called ordeal
shamanism the Sundance 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 Hollis antigens in North America just
Reinforced that whole beer and woolen and uptight thing that came from Europe
the only major
Hollis antigen to have a role in Native American culture is
of course peyote and
many people without informing themselves
imagined that peyote is something which goes
Millennia into the past and that it 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 old
Burial sites in the Rio Grande Valley and South you don't find peyote
What you find are the beans of Sephora Secunda folia
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
Constrain if you all know what color a mace are these are Aerith dryness which are related to these things
Okay, that stuff contains
Cytosine and
cysteine this is
These are what are called ordeal poisons, and it might be worthwhile to just talk for a minute about our deal 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 certain parts of the world
Where howís antigens 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 ab reaction you get straight you shed some of your
complexes and you make a you turn over a new leaf this
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 the Sephora Secunda folia cult
someone discovered peyote and
sadly
You know, thank God and then the other the other plant which was big in the in the
Southern California northern Mexico and across the southwest were the
Tropane containing de Torres the so called to lodge religion of southern california. Well, these are
deliriant
Confusions that are unless you have a psychic Constitution that is not like mine
you can't take these things there - 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 Katmandu you may notice in the gutter or you'll notice plenty in the gutter
But you may also notice these datura pods
Empty datura pods and I know the stomach started asking questions and then out at the Kings game preserve past
Pashupatinath, I found a bunch of these things and laid in a supply
and
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 with
An Englishman a friend of mine who lived in this little village in Nepal where I lived?
He was also experimenting with this stuff 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
You know, we weren't 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 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
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 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 across the Eurasian continent North American northern Mexico now things get interesting
Because as you leave the Sonoran uplands and go south
in the Sierra Mazatec
it is this mushroom complex, which
valentina and Gordon Watson discovered in the 1953
S17 222 species. It depends on who's counting of
extremely endemic meaning very localised species of mushrooms all producing psilocybin a
coincident with the Mayan the cultural site of the Mayan mixtec and Mazatec and
civilizations and this is su assignment an
extraordinarily
powerful
visionary and benign
hallucinogenic metabolite once the Wasson's
had nailed down this Mexican mushroom complex, then people started checking and they discovered these mushrooms or
conspecific species in many localities
- that are worth mentioning are the Pacific Northwest, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia
Which appears to be the world's center for species?
density of the psilocybin gene and
strangely enough
Very good ethnographic research turns up. No hint that these
Kwakiutl shim-sham
Enget 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 knot 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 logos 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 to collect the semi land sea otter
Mushrooms, they I've been told I haven't been to these sites, but I've been told that
Ionia where the Book of Kells was
composed and where
St. Columba went is
covered with mushrooms is very clearly any
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 in France and the Italian parts of France
the more le family has the more L on their
Escutcheon, there are other mushroom families and mushroom
Names, so there may have been you know, 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 Grove's
but
The plant that is always mentioned is the druid
psychedelic psychic plant of choice is
mistletoe but mistletoe is chemically very
disappointing and I've wondered 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 isn't on an
untapped area
once you get into the new world tropics, then you are in the great domain of
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
biologists, but try to imagine
figuring out a set of evolutionary
Constraints that we're 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 Flora's both
equatorial both climax data species rich climax and
One has dozens of house in urchins in it, and the other has none
none
This is not well understood, I mean theories range as wildly as
obviously that South America must be where the flying saucer landed and
You know, that's where the genes were seeded. I
I confess I'm not sure why it is
At first I thought that it had to do with the extremely primitive state
So-called primitive these 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 is
It has had centuries and centuries for which in which these things could be forgotten
but of course then come the botanist who care nothing for
Ethnographic data and who simply carry out plant surveys and chemical analysis of plants
They can't find these howís antigens either. So this is a great mystery in
the tropics of them of
Mesoamerica and and
the equatorial tropics of the new world there's a vast
panoply of Hallas antigens not only the mushroom complex, but then also this ayahuasca or
yah-hey
Complex that we've referred to several times
this is a huge jungle vine and
As we cross into the yah-hey area
We also cross we cross an interesting
Barrier
Because we move from plants
single plants which are hallucinogenic Li 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
well, 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-carboline s that inhibit Mao and the plants that contain DMT they can intensify or
de-emphasize
the visions
well, most of the
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 ban Asteria
Yahei! Ayahuasca
Beverages these are things you drink and then it comes on
You know these outlandish trips as you go down into the lower base and the banisteriopsis
Cult gives way to these snuff cults
abena and Neal Poe depending on the languages
These are don't depend on an MAO inhibitor for their activity because they're absorbed through the sub nasal
mucosa
Which is an extremely effective way for getting drugs
into the system the problem with these
with that complex, the snuff complex is that we are just physically such delicate and
Wimpy people that we can't stand that route route of drug
administration because what they do is they toast these seeds of
Anodyne anther a peregrine this huge leguminous tree, which is the source of the seeds
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 nostril 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
and it's just like being hit in the face with a
2x4. I mean it's like being hit in the face and you fall over backwards you scream you salivate
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 then you know and your eyes your sinuses can't believe what's happening to you
So you have to sort out this whole sinus?
shock, which is going on in parallel with them an
evolving strange state of mind which is beginning to take over and and
Clarify everything and then there are numerous
minor
variations on these things
Might talk just a little bit about the chemistry of
These things and the chemistry of how the sentence generally my attitude toward these
this question of
Plants compounds drugs should these things be used for spiritual growth?
If the answer is no then that finishes, you know 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 threeway test that I will share with you because I think it's maybe them
Operationally the most useful thing you'll hear this weekend and that is if you are contemplating
some
Some compound some plant then the first thing to ask yourself is
Does it occur in nature does it have some?
tangential 'ti 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 z-- certain things have undergone the formality of
actually occurring
You know and then and so certain certain compounds have undergone the formality of actually
occurring in the biological
matrix, and so they should be they should be our pool out of which our
Experimental compound 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 from 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
The those with you know, and and that it has passed
that test
Then finally the
Narrowest gate through which a compound has to go to 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 it has no receptors for just some crazy thing, you know
five amino three
Triethyl fin file an accident or something. We don't want that. There's 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 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 Hollis antigens 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 since second place is lost over the horizon
Yet
Yet
It is the most benign of all house energons
Because it occurs as an endogenous neurotransmitter
in the normal human brain
We every single one of us at this moment have an end dimethyltryptamine
being synthesized
activated and degraded in our
synaptic membrane
So this is almost a paradox the most benign of all house antigens the most
Fast-acting I should also add is also the most harmless
The the easiest to take it sort of remove it sort of puts a certain obligation
On the experience 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. Could 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 union
analyst and
What?
Completely blew my mind about DMT and I mention it in again. Here's an opportunity for research is
How trash 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 young 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 from with this from ceramic from second. Millennia Peru and also men dyin
embroidery work
We know motifs. We're trained to recognize and connect disparate
Aesthetic domains or when I smoked DMT and came down I said, you know, this is not on the map
I can't believe it that 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 ven of what is human that they are apparently not accessible in
structuring our
maps of our self and our psyche and
for me was the contact with what I call and I didn't call it this rudolf otto called it this and
this term influenced young otto proceeded young was it is the holy
other
And if there is an archetype of the holy other then this is it
But perhaps the whole the other
Transcends the archetypes this may explain to some degree Jung's interest in Gnosticism
Especially the Valentinian school of Gnosticism which holds you know 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 the machinery of faith is. It's not zodiacal machinery, its
Hardwiring in our psychology and our genes that gives us our fate
Well, so having said that
I've not only made the
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 in to the existence of women because they
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 knock out 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 overwhelm n't 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
Herethen a their own hero's 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
And to reshape and remake your psyche. Well, I see the entire
illness of our
Civilization as an 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 I see the ego as a phenomenon arising in historical
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 fifteen thousand 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
