Joe Rogan is joined by author Dennis McKenna to discuss his new book, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, and the life and career of his late brother Terrence McKenna. Also, the band Honey Honey Band is playing the End of the World show at the Wiltern Theater on Friday, Dec. 21st, and there are only about 100 seats left. So if you want in, you better hurry up and get your tickets, because there's only a few seats left! And if you don't, you're not going to want to miss this one. It's going to be a wild one, and we're here to tell you why you should definitely go see it. Also, we're going to try to do a live show at The Improv on Thursday, but it's a Death Squad show, and Jeff Richards is going to host it, so be sure to check it out at The Comedy Cellar. And as always, thank you so much for tuning into HYPEBEAST Radio and Business of HYPE. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to our other shows MIC/LINE, The Anthropology, The HYPE Report, and HYPETALKS. Please also, rate and review our new show on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe to our new podcast Podchaser.ee/TheChadCast and leave us a rating and review on iTunes! Thank you so we can keep spreading the word out there about this podcast! -Jon Sorrents and other things going on the internet about HYPETEVERYTHING going on this week's episode of HYPETEROSYS and other shit like that's cool and cool! and we'll send you a review on the Podchats and other cool things you like it too! on the podchats! Thanks again for listening, Jon Sorrentino and thanks for listening to the pod, Jon and Brett and Brett are looking out for you. -Dennis McKenna -Kaitlyn and Brett is looking forward to seeing you in the next episode of The Vagabaugh and all that's going on in the future of the podcast and we hope you're having a good time! Love ya, Brett and Brent and Brett loves you, too much else. Brian and Brett, too! -Kai and Brett & Brett - Kevin Pereira - Thank you for listening and sending us love and all good vibes!
00:01:15.000And that also pays to support the Death Squad podcast network that Brian produces, which has the excellent Kevin Pereira Pointless show on it now.
00:02:00.000Dennis McKenna, first of all, and your friends, I'm sorry, I forgot your names because we might have indulged in something that makes you forget things really quickly.
00:04:25.000Like, how confident he is to talk like that.
00:04:27.000Well, one of the things that was always sort of charming about Terence was that it didn't really matter what he said.
00:04:34.000I mean, I used to get after him and say, what you said 20 minutes ago didn't make any sense.
00:04:39.000And it directly contradicts what you just said, which also doesn't make any sense.
00:04:45.000But the thing is it doesn't matter because Terry, Terence, he could have read the phone book and it would have sounded great and people would be hanging on every word because he just had that gift.
00:04:59.000He could mesmerize people and he was obviously super intelligent, widely read, knew all this stuff as a result of his Reading in the Tussman program and before that, alchemy and,
00:05:15.000you know, black magic and Eastern philosophy and all of this stuff.
00:05:19.000You know, I mean, he was by far a much broader scholar than I'll ever be.
00:06:30.000But it was all about sing-along with Mitch.
00:06:32.000And he would present the show and they'd sing all these old songs.
00:06:35.000And he'd get people in the audience watching television to sing, right?
00:06:41.000And so Terrence went on one of these programs and the moderator said, you know, you're like sing-along with Mitch, except it's like, think-along with Terrence.
00:07:51.000He was well-educated, and he could make whatever he was talking about make sense, or sound like it was making sense, even when it didn't, you know?
00:08:02.000Well, he had so many interesting ideas that opened up so many people to...
00:08:08.000To new possibilities, but there were most certainly a few of them that were very, very controversial.
00:08:14.000Time wave zero, novelty theory being a big one, which I tried to explain this to a friend of mine once, and just trying to explain it, I sounded completely crazy.
00:08:28.000He was trying to figure out how to measure time through using the I Ching, which is an ancient Chinese method of divination that's somehow based on...
00:09:40.000But if he rediscovered an ancient Chinese calendar based on the I Ching, That would have been remarkable.
00:09:46.000A few Chinese scholars would have congratulated him and nobody would have, you know, noticed beyond that.
00:09:52.000But then he, you know, sort of postulated this whole crazy notion about time and about how time was a fractal structure and made up of resonances.
00:10:04.000And anyway, the sort of, you know, the thing of interest for most people was that he had to postulate an end date.
00:10:14.000He postulated several end dates, you know, because the theory said it had to have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
00:10:20.000He postulated several end dates, but the one he finally settled on was December 21, 2012, you know, which was Close enough.
00:10:30.000I mean, he actually postulated an end date that was slightly off that by several weeks.
00:13:57.000Or was it the testing of the bomb in Alamogordo?
00:13:59.000Or was it, you know, Einstein's discovery of the equations that enabled this to be possible?
00:14:05.000All those things were novel events, which happened very quietly and kind of unnoticed.
00:14:11.000But if they hadn't happened, this spectacular thing over Hiroshima would not have happened either, right?
00:14:18.000So my view of it was that novelty kind of diffuses into history rather than erupt into history.
00:14:26.000And pretty soon, you know, everything changes.
00:14:28.000But it changes over time, and we're not even subjectively aware of it that much.
00:14:34.000What was his motivation to pursue that, like to pursue such a strange and very hard to follow theory?
00:14:45.000Well, to pursue this time wave theory, well, to explain that, we really have to go back to We should probably explain the time wave, too, for people who don't know what the hell we're talking about.
00:14:58.000There might be people that are going, what the fuck are they saying?
00:15:03.000Well, the time wave theory is this mathematical construct, you know, based on the I Ching that Terence got basically downloaded to him when we did the...
00:15:16.000What's been famously known as the Experiment at La Charrera, you know, which the book also talks about and which, again, a lot of people, if you're a Terence McKenna fan, you know what that is.
00:15:27.000If you're not, you're wondering, what the hell is this, you know?
00:15:31.000So, but the Experiment at La Charrera was when we Well, how do we explain it?
00:15:39.000I don't even know if we could go into it on the podcast, but it was something that we attempted to do when we went to South America looking for exotic hallucinogens, and this was in 1971. And we were motivated...
00:15:59.000I mean, I'm sort of getting off track here, but I'm trying to bring it back to the issue of the time wave.
00:16:05.000We were motivated to go in 1971, basically by our interest and fascination with DMT. I mean, that was what...
00:16:25.000You know, extremely not on the streets or anything.
00:16:29.000It was hard to come by, but we had come by it.
00:16:34.000I had the experience of it and thought, holy Christ, you know, there is nothing else more interesting than this that we've ever encountered.
00:16:43.000And so, you know, we were involved in all the political turmoil and anti-Vietnam War movements You know, free speech and all of that.
00:17:24.000You can't bring back much from it other than just an overwhelming impression of awe and amazement and that you've looked into some other world that's more...
00:17:36.000Bizarre than anything you've ever seen encountered.
00:17:40.000So we thought if we could find an orally active form of this DMT, that it would last longer.
00:18:03.000And so we read about this very obscure...
00:18:09.000A drug prepared from a species of tree in South America is called varolas and Schultes, the famous ethnobotanist from Harvard, published a paper in 1970 called Varola as an Orally Active Hallucinogen.
00:18:27.000Now, varola is normally used as a snuff in South America.
00:18:31.000I mean, the certain tribes, the Yanomamo and other tribes, Extract the sap, they dry it down, they make a snuff out of it.
00:18:39.000But there were a couple of tribes that made an oral preparation from it.
00:18:44.000So that attracted our attention, and we decided to go to South America and look for, you know, this Witoto drug called Ukuhe, or something like that, Ukuhe.
00:18:58.000And it happened to be that the ancestral home of the Witoto was at La Chirera.
00:19:04.000That's what led us to go to La Chirera originally, right, was the search for this drug that...
00:19:09.000No one ever heard of, except us and Ari Schultes.
00:19:14.000And so we went there, looking for that, and...
00:19:23.000Well, at the time, nobody knew much about ayahuasca.
00:19:27.000I mean, ayahuasca is also an orally active form of DMT, but we didn't know that at the time, and nobody did.
00:19:40.000When we got to La Charrera, we found that The mission village that we set up, that we stayed at, the Mission La Torreira, had cleared pastures all around, about a couple hundred acres of pastures.
00:19:57.000And they brought Cebu cattle into this place, the white humpback cattle.
00:20:02.000Well, the shit, the dung of this cattle is the preferred...
00:20:26.000Again, this was 1971. A lot of people hadn't had much experience with psilocybin mushrooms, but we knew from our references what this mushroom was.
00:20:36.000We'd never taken it, but we thought, great, psilocybin mushrooms, wonderful.
00:22:00.000You know, I mean, there wasn't that much to eat at La Chereur.
00:22:05.000We had brought canned goods and rice and things like that, but we found that it was very easy to just kind of slip a few mushrooms into the soup, you know?
00:22:34.000The intelligence that spoke through the mushroom, you know, it was never quite clear, but there was definitely, it was like having a very intelligent guest at your party, and, you know, you didn't see it, but you definitely were in touch with it.
00:22:50.000And it began to suggest this experiment that we could do, I mean, this wild experiment, the experiment of La Charrera.
00:23:04.000I don't know how much detail you want to go into on this, but we performed this experiment, trying to get it back to the I Ching and the time wave thing.
00:23:13.000We performed this experiment, which was something like...
00:23:16.000Creating the philosopher's stone, essentially, out of our own DNA and the DNA of a mushroom and sound and light and singing to the mushroom and coming up, you know, creating these superconducting resonances and,
00:23:37.000You can read about it in the book, you know, but we had this idea that we could essentially...
00:23:45.000I mean, I guess I should back up and explain it.
00:23:48.000We had this idea that the sounds That you could hear on high doses of mushrooms.
00:23:54.000I don't know if your experience with DMT, you hear things, right?
00:23:58.000You often hear over-tonal sounds and the whole aural space is as interesting as the visual space in some ways.
00:24:06.000Well, on high doses of mushrooms, that's similar as well.
00:24:10.000And, you know, if you listen to these sounds, you can start to sort of try to imitate them and, you know, you can sing along with them or you can vocalize along with them.
00:24:21.000And the attempts to vocalize them are generally not so good, they're hard to imitate, but you reach a certain point where you just lock on to it and then it just pours out of you in a very powerful way and in a way that it's like almost being possessed or something.
00:24:44.000So the mushroom suggested to us a lot of ideas about what these sounds were and how they could actually set up molecular resonances in our own brains, our own DNA,
00:25:00.000and the DNA of a mushroom, and that we could essentially...
00:25:07.000Well, in some ways, create the ultimate object.
00:25:12.000Create the ultimate artifact, which would be ourselves, our own minds in an externalized form.
00:25:21.000In a physical form that you can carry around?
00:25:23.000In a physical form that you could actually carry around.
00:26:14.000It was, the mushroom was, you know, the mushroom or whoever was communicating through the mushrooms was just matter-of-factly sort of wrapping this down.
00:26:26.000And, you know, we were receptive to it and it was like we're writing furiously and it's like we developed this experiment, this idea, which had a whole lot of predictions.
00:26:37.000I mean, crazy predictions that, yeah, you would actually have, at the end of the day, Or the night, more accurately, you would have a physical object that would be outside the body, but it would be you.
00:26:53.000And it turns out there's all sorts of precedent for this, right?
00:26:58.000I mean, the idea of the alchemist's stone, the philosopher's stone, or...
00:27:03.000The time machine, the flying saucer, the alchemist scrying mirror that you can look into and see the future.
00:27:13.000I mean, this idea haunts The human imagination.
00:27:17.000That there is a way you can externalize the imagination and still be it.
00:27:26.000And this thing that you would have, or whatever it was, would be responsive to your imagination.
00:27:32.000And it would be able to do literally whatever you could imagine.
00:27:36.000That's sort of an alternate theory on UFOs, isn't it, as well, that the imagination actually can conjure up a physical object?
00:30:18.000If anything, it was closer to a shamanic I mean, the motifs of shamanic initiation more than the motifs of psychosis fit what went on.
00:30:31.000We were transformed, and we were transformed in a complementary way.
00:30:36.000And we also reintegrated, more or less, you know, so that, I mean, I'm fairly functional now.
00:30:45.000I don't know that I've ever totally reintegrated, but you know what I mean.
00:30:48.000It wasn't a Shamanic initiation is where you go through this metamorphosis, and things are done to you, and you're torn apart, and you're changed, but then you're put back together in a different form.
00:32:22.000The stone will condense at some points.
00:32:25.000But so it became this whole game sort of of trying to predict when will the stone condense.
00:32:32.000And so Terence began charting our course, you know, and he found like he was...
00:32:39.000He counted back 64 days, two times 64 days to the...
00:32:46.000From the date of the experiment and it turns out that was the date of our mother's death, the previous October, right?
00:32:54.000And then he started counting forward from that date several cycles of 64 and it turns out that was his birthday in 1971. So that became a sort of focus for predicting when it would condense.
00:33:11.000So over the years he tried to I guess fine-tune this prediction, fine-tune this, and that's what the whole elaborate time-wave theory grew out of.
00:33:24.000If there was an alien artifact that was given to us by this experiment, then it was this.
00:33:33.000It was this mathematical construction, which wasn't given to me, it was given to him.
00:33:39.000What was given to me were I mean, the experience of being smeared over the cosmos and then gradually over 14 days basically condensing myself back into a body.
00:34:58.000Do you subscribe to the idea that these ancient cultures like the Mayans and these people that have these incredible structures, that very likely this was psilocybin-induced or their culture was psilocybin-induced?
00:35:14.000I think there's a good chance that it was.
00:35:17.000I mean, I think that that wasn't the only, that certainly wasn't the only infeogen that the Mayans knew about, but that was an important one.
00:35:29.000They knew about You know, they knew about all the Central American ones, the Morning Glories, Olaliuki, the, you know, probably Salvia, probably all of those.
00:35:40.000But the Mayans definitely knew about mushrooms.
00:35:43.000And I think it's likely that mushrooms, you know, I mean, if you talk about the stoned ape theory, you know, which you've talked about and Terence has talked about, it's most likely mushrooms, you know, because mushrooms are,
00:36:15.000They don't require any preparation, right?
00:36:18.000No technology needed other than the curiosity to bend over, pick it up, and munch it.
00:36:26.000And once you do that, then the impact had to be profound.
00:36:32.000And we're talking about omnivorous primates here who are hungry all the time, very acutely You know, keyed into their environment, I mean, it's not like they're going to overlook this, right?
00:36:46.000So they'll see it, and they'll eat it.
00:36:48.000And they test things, and they're omnivores.
00:36:51.000They're omnivores, and they test things.
00:36:53.000And so they test this, and then they get the message.
00:36:59.000And I think that, you know, In the stoned ape theory, there are things that are puzzling to me that I totally don't completely understand.
00:37:14.000If you look at the archaeological evidence for the critical period when consciousness emerged in our species, Except for a couple of indications that go way back, like half a million years.
00:37:30.000But, you know, the efflorescence of artistic expression, which is really the only way you can tell, happened sometime between 100,000 years ago and 8,000 years ago.
00:37:41.000You know, you look at the cave paintings and some of the oldest ones, the Blombos Cave in South Africa goes 80,000 years.
00:37:50.000Those artifacts were clearly done by conscious beings with an artistic sense.
00:37:56.000So if that equates to cognition, then clearly consciousness was happening somewhere after 100,000 years.
00:38:13.000Up until now, presumably, you know, consciousness was happening.
00:38:17.000But if you look at the fossil record, the neurologically modern brain was much older than that, you know?
00:38:26.000I mean, essentially, You know, at least 100,000, maybe 200,000 years older than this emergence of consciousness.
00:38:35.000You know, the neurologically modern brain with all the apparatus needed to generate language, right?
00:40:32.000I mean, I think they are aware of their sort of cognitive environment, if you want to put it that way, The same one that we inhabit, but a lot of this stuff goes into the background for us,
00:41:04.000We live in a world in which abstractions and symbols are as real as anything in the outside world.
00:41:18.000We live in a world in which symbols have significance, and that is the basis of language, our ability to perceive meaning.
00:41:28.000And it's based on this sort of unconscious synesthesia, which we do all the time.
00:41:43.000With respect to the evolution of the primate brain, what I think I'm postulating is that something like mushrooms were able to We're good to go.
00:42:13.000And ROQs, but it made the essential connection to significance, the feeling of significance.
00:43:02.000Primatological factors, maternal inheritance factors, you know, I mean, this is a whole other area of...
00:43:08.000We didn't even really describe the theory for people who don't know what the higher primate theory is, or excuse me, that's why, that's his t-shirt here.
00:43:18.000The stone dape theory is that Psilocybin mushrooms, or psychedelic mushrooms, were responsible for creating human beings.
00:43:27.000And one of Terence's assertions was that the doubling of the human brain size occurred over a period of about two million years.
00:43:36.000And that this correlates to the timeline of these rainforests receding into grasslands, and then these monkey apes experimenting with different food sources.
00:43:50.000Does that stuff all jive with core samples and climate studies?
00:43:55.000Is all that stuff the same time with the human brain size doubled?
00:44:05.000I don't think you could put your finger on any one factor and say this was responsible for the expansion of the human brain, but definitely the...
00:44:14.000You know, transition from arboreal to plane-type existence, existence on the Serengeti, was a time of incredible environmental stress for these primates.
00:44:30.000And for the whole environment, they had to adapt.
00:44:33.000And they had to, you know, learn a whole new diet, a whole new mode of existence.
00:44:40.000And it's not clear the time frame that this took place over.
00:45:24.000You know, was there a point around 100,000 years ago where the climate in that area got much wetter and suddenly these things became more common?
00:45:38.000But I think one of the characteristics that we do know about psychedelics is that they can induce this feeling of what's been called portentousness, right?
00:45:52.000The feeling of a feeling that an experience, something is significant.
00:45:58.000It's a feeling of reverence or awe or, you know, All of those things that we associate with religious sensibilities.
00:47:22.000They are a tremendous mystery that is terrifying and fascinating at the same time.
00:47:33.000This has been the continuing carrot that's pulled our species forward.
00:47:39.000In my lectures, I sometimes liken them to the idea of the monolith in 2001. Kubrick tried to concretize that idea, the idea of the monolith, something that's utterly alien, totally incomprehensible,
00:47:59.000They can't take their eyes off of it, and it inserts itself into history or evolution at critical junctures.
00:48:09.000It just shows up, you know, and things happen.
00:48:13.000And I'm saying we don't need to invoke the monolith because that's what the psychedelics in nature are, you know, our own built-in monolith, you know, built into the biosphere.
00:48:26.000Do you find it frustrating that that's not considered by The standard people of science when they discuss theories of evolution.
00:48:37.000It's really strange to me how they factor it out.
00:48:41.000It's weird how there's obviously a bunch of different factors.
00:48:45.000Cooking meat, the throwing arm, there's a lot of different factors.
00:48:50.000But why would they not consider that as well?
00:48:54.000That's always been really confusing to me and the only thing that makes sense is that they haven't done it.
00:49:21.000But this very well respected South African scholar who wrote a book about how altered states in You know, shamanic rituals carried out in the dark or in the almost total darkness in these caves.
00:49:37.000That's what the cave paintings were about.
00:49:39.000These things were painted by people in highly altered states doing shamanic ceremonies.
00:49:46.000But even the guy who wrote the book will not take mushrooms.
00:49:54.000I mean, he wrote about his work with great enthusiasm and admiration and said, you know, if you want to confirm your theory, this is what you do.
00:50:05.000Why is it that if he did do it, though, if he did do it publicly, it would hurt him in an academic sense.
00:50:12.000Well, that's probably why he didn't do it.
00:50:24.000That is the honest thing to do as a scientist.
00:50:29.000And I think if enough of the right people, you know, the people in this field actually would let themselves have this experience, I think the controversy would resolve itself.
00:50:41.000Because those of us who have experienced it, it just seems obvious.
00:50:46.000It just seems, it's very strange to me that it's not considered even as a factor at all when if you've had the impact, you've had the experience personally, you know the incredible impact that it has.
00:50:58.000How could that not be considered in terms of Something that affects consciousness.
00:51:03.000If you're talking about someone who has no science, someone who has no books to read, someone who has, you know, whatever language existed at the time, having a blowout psychedelic experience would be so staggeringly profound on the shaping of your vision of the world that it's weird that it's not considered.
00:51:22.000And it's really a shame as far as the way the people that educate people in this world, whether it's in high school or whether it's in Universities or colleges that they personally are not aware and or have been educated by this experience because it's not what everybody thinks it is.
00:51:42.000Everyone has this idea that it's escape from reality, you're running away from things, you're clouding things up with drugs and that because it's under this one blanket, this one blanket of description, drugs, It's really weird that it's not considered as a factor in the development of the human being.
00:52:00.000No, well, exactly, because of the rubric it's put under.
00:52:05.000I mean, people, it's one of these things that exists in the shadow, you know, it's in the shadow and the reason it's in the shadow Is because it is a true mystery.
00:52:18.000And true mysteries are freighted with numinosity, right?
00:52:23.000And, you know, I mean, despite the lip service that the church pays to all this stuff, I mean, the main mission of the church is to...
00:52:33.000Ensure that people do not have genuine religious experiences, right?
00:52:38.000I mean, that's the most dangerous thing to the church that there could possibly be if someone bypasses all the priests and the whole, you know, hierarchical structure and just goes out and talks to God.
00:52:51.000Well, God's gonna give you a different message than the priests are giving you, I tell you.
00:52:59.000What did you think of John Marco Allegro's work, the sacred mushroom in the cross, his assertion that, for the folks who don't know this one, just a brief one, he was a scholar who was an ordained minister who became a theologian.
00:53:14.000As he was studying theology, he became agnostic and reviewed, according to him, the Dead Sea Scrolls and believed at the end of 14 years of studying it that it was essentially The entire Christian religion was about psychedelic mushroom use and fertility cults.
00:53:30.000He wrote this book called The Sacred Mushroom on the Cross.
00:53:34.000His assertion is that Jesus actually was a mushroom.
00:53:39.000Well, I don't know if Jesus was a mushroom, but I do think that Allegro was a serious scholar, and I think it's a shame that he was vilified the way he was, because he was a philologist, right?
00:53:53.000He was a specialist in these Aramaic languages.
00:53:57.000He was one of the people appointed, one of the scholars appointed to the translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
00:54:06.000And he was incidentally, apparently, according to Andy Redovit and people like that, he was the only one who wasn't a priest on this committee, for one thing.
00:54:16.000So he was immediately sort of outside the officially approved circles.
00:54:24.000I'm not a philologist, but I think to the extent that...
00:54:28.000I mean, you know, so I'm not really qualified to interpret...
00:54:33.000Whether his scholarship was together or not, he was well enough qualified to be appointed to this translation committee, so he must have had something going for himself.
00:54:46.000And when, as his account is, he says, honestly, you know, when I reviewed all this stuff and began to put two and two together, it seemed that there were all these allusions to fungi.
00:55:49.000We know that the Gnostics, which is the pre-Christian or quasi-Christian group that wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, out of which Christianity supposedly I mean,
00:56:17.000the God of the Bible of Genesis was seen in Gnosticism as an evil entity, right?
00:56:25.000Because it was keeping humanity imprisoned in the world of matter.
00:56:30.000When the soul longed to be liberated into the light and all that.
00:56:36.000So that was his view of this whole thing.
00:56:40.000Not Allegro's view, but that was the view of Gnosticism.
00:56:43.000That's a pretty psychedelic vision right there.
00:56:47.000It wouldn't surprise me at all if this group was using either Amanita muscaria and or some kind of psilocybin mushrooms.
00:58:07.000How are they not being used all throughout these religions today?
00:58:13.000How did all the different intellectual societies of this world lose touch with perhaps the very thing that gave us our initial intellectual curiosity?
00:58:24.000How could it happen that at the highest levels of learning, which is where we're at in 2012, if you follow a linear timeline, this is as advanced as we've ever been.
00:58:34.000So if that is the case, how is it possible that it's removed from CNN and the New York Times?
00:58:42.000It's not something that's being not just a once in a blue moon John Hopkins study which shows that it improves your personality, but some legitimate consideration to that it might have been a factor in why we're here.
00:58:54.000And one of the reasons why we're so fucked up, one of the reasons why our society is so crazy is because we're detached from One of the very things that might have created this human being in the first place.
00:59:05.000That seems to me to be something that should be considered.
00:59:09.000It seems to me like if you look at all the other factors like eating meat and the throwing arm and figuring out complex problems and hunting and all the things that could have happened, how could you not?
00:59:21.000Be looking really closely at this one mushroom that makes you see incredible visions, explore realms that seem realer than this reality that we live in right now.
00:59:35.000The only reason is because either you haven't experienced it or you have experienced it and you're terrified and you're trying to Keep everyone else from it.
00:59:50.000What we have to understand, the proper venue, if you will, or the proper human institution to kind of be the steward of this mystery, it's a real mystery, right?
01:00:04.000Even though we understand a lot about the neuroscience, we can talk about neurochemistry and receptors and all that, that does not make the connection or cross the bridge between what we experience when we take it.
01:00:17.000We know all about the underlying neurophysiology of it, but it still doesn't bridge the gap to what we actually experience.
01:00:35.000You know, how does the brain-mind generate or experience consciousness?
01:00:39.000But, you know, it is a genuine mystery and Human institutions and properly should be the province of religion, but religions don't serve that anymore.
01:00:53.000Religions are political institutions, right?
01:00:56.000I mean, if they have a real mystery, they want to put it in a box and put it over here someplace and keep people from it, you know?
01:01:04.000Because that gets in the way of promulgating the doctrine, and the doctrine is, you know, toe the line, don't ask too many questions, have faith, right?
01:01:14.000You must have faith, which generally means, which means essentially you have to believe a lot of stuff we tell you for which there's no evidence.
01:01:44.000And they work in conjunction now in our culture with governments and corporations.
01:01:50.000And to have people, you know, taking mushrooms and having all these funny ideas and questioning the status quo, this is not, this doesn't serve the agenda, you know.
01:02:02.000But how many people who are making the agenda, how many people really truly have had the experience?
01:02:09.000Is it that they don't want these people having it and thinking about things and coming up with new solutions and trying to reshape society?
01:02:18.000Or is it complete ignorance and just trying to suppress it because it's in their best financial interests?
01:02:28.000I mean, whether they do it out of ignorance or whether there's a more sinister agenda.
01:02:33.000Which is, you know, perhaps some of them have had this experience and realize that for people to be having these types of experiences is a threat to the status quo.
01:02:45.000Because exactly as you say, it motivates us to change the way we are, to change the way we relate to the world, you know, and we're no longer good people.
01:03:00.000I think it's ironic, just in a way, back in the 60s, DMT used to be called the businessman's trip.
01:03:08.000The idea was you could smoke it on your lunch hour and get back to work after your lunch hour, except that after you smoked DMT. Who would even want to go back to your cubicle?
01:03:20.000So they're inherently subversive in the sense that they encourage people to take personal responsibility for themselves and think for themselves.
01:03:33.000Thinking for oneself is a discouraged activity these days.
01:03:38.000There's also the issue of a lack of guidance in this country, especially when it comes to these different things because of the fact that they're illegal.
01:03:50.000People don't understand how to use them.
01:03:52.000They don't understand where they're going to get them from.
01:03:55.000It would be amazing if we had shamanic institutes where people would go and there would be someone who could literally guide you along.
01:04:07.000I mean, if we were really An intelligent culture that trusted each other as grown adults with the ability to make choices and have educated choices.
01:04:31.000I think that's a subtle way, and it won't attract a lot of attention.
01:04:35.000But I think that, you know, until it's a done deal, in a sense, I think that what we're witnessing now is that with this psychedelic renaissance, you know, in the 60s and all that, that's all gone.
01:04:53.000And now we're in a position to revisit this whole thing and take a second look in a calmer way.
01:05:01.000And I think a lot of the research that you see happening is going to...
01:05:08.000I mean, I know the institution I'm affiliated with in that respect is the Hefter Research Institute.
01:05:15.000People should check that out, hefter.org, because most of the leading researchers in psychedelics are on our board, right, or either on our board or supported by Hefter to some degree.
01:05:31.000But the work that people like Roland Griffiths are doing, there are other investigators, but he's well known, What he's doing is the way you open the door to the use of these things is two paths, either religious or medicine.
01:05:48.000If you can find a legitimate medical use for psilocybin, then that changes everything because that means that the FDA can be pressured to change the scheduling of it.
01:06:02.000Once the scheduling of it has changed, it's now Schedule 1, right?
01:06:06.000And the first criterion of Schedule 1 is a dangerous drug with no possible medical use.
01:06:12.000Well, if you do good, rigorous science and you do several clinical studies, which is what they're doing with this psilocybin end-of-life kind of approach to it, helping people to come to terms With their impending death and deal with the anxiety and the spiritual crisis around that,
01:06:34.000that's essentially what they're using.
01:06:37.000But if you can show legitimately that it has a use in that respect, then you can change the regulatory framework.
01:06:47.000You can actually get it Approved for that use.
01:06:51.000Once it's approved for that use, you have to change the scheduling of it from Schedule 1 to probably Schedule 2. But then you open up the possibility of off-label uses, right, as with any drug.
01:07:06.000And then therapists can start to use it.
01:07:09.000And I think that you will see in 10 years, maybe, you will see Exactly that.
01:07:16.000You will see institutes, places where you can go.
01:07:21.000I mean, the next step is to say, well, if psilocybin can benefit dying people, maybe it can benefit well people.
01:07:36.000But just spiritual evolution, just a discipline, you know, which is what shamanism is.
01:07:44.000People have to go to South America now to find this stuff.
01:07:47.000And they do, and a lot of them go there because they're not finding any spiritual satisfaction in our own institutions.
01:07:57.000So what we have to do is create our own institutions that are not copies of South American shamanism, but our own neo-shamanism, in a sense, that borrows from these different traditions.
01:08:44.000But back to the question, do you see that the classification from marijuana, which still...
01:08:51.000Despite all the evidence to the contrary, even some really interesting stuff about cancer.
01:08:57.000All that Rick Simpson hemp seed oil, or I guess it's really hash oil, because it is psychoactive.
01:09:03.000He calls it hemp oil, I guess maybe to make people feel better about it.
01:09:07.000Whatever it is, the work that that guy's done, All the different studies have shown what it does for glaucoma patients, what it does for wasting syndrome, and people who have a hard time getting...
01:09:19.000Why is there no change in the classification of that?
01:09:22.000Because it seems like there's a good body of work that shows some medical uses for it.
01:09:26.000Especially when you consider that cocaine is Schedule II. Right.
01:09:29.000Cocaine is Schedule II because it has recognized medical use, right?
01:09:38.000The whole situation in a way is I think with respect to cannabis is is somehow different because it's so freighted with political considerations.
01:09:51.000I mean that don't really plague the psychedelics to the same extent because even though we're immersed in this world of psychedelics and we think it's important we're still talking you know two three percent of the population at most if that even gives a shit about psychedelics marijuana is like sixty percent of the population so I just think you're seeing...
01:10:19.000I think the pharmaceutical cartel in some ways is lined up against this because medical marijuana is potentially so useful for so many things that they're making money on right now by making drugs to treat them.
01:10:37.000Research efforts, if you look at what's going on in the back room and they're not talking about, they're totally into cannabinoid chemistry, right?
01:10:45.000I mean, they're developing all kinds of pharmaceuticals, but those are patentable compounds that they can own and produce synthetically and charge you a lot of money for.
01:10:56.000So I think that pot is a threat to the I think the government is kind of deer in the headlights about it, you know, as the Obama administration's reaction to the latest legalization.
01:11:16.000I mean, finally they're beginning to get their act together and say the right thing, which is, okay, apparently we'll just let this social experiment go forward and see where it goes, which is the right thing to do.
01:11:29.000And I think if they do that, you'll see it evolve.
01:11:33.000Other states will say, well, Washington and Colorado legalized pot.
01:11:37.000They didn't collapse, and they're making a lot of money off taxes.
01:12:24.000They just ruin you financially and every other way.
01:12:26.000And physically because you're going to be freaking out because you're thinking you might have to go to jail because federally what happens is when you are not violating state law but you are violating federal law, when you go to trial they don't even let you use the term medical marijuana.
01:13:08.000Unquestionably, you're putting people in jail that do not, not only do they not deserve to be in jail, they haven't done anything wrong.
01:13:15.000They're providing people with something that they want and they're doing it according to a law.
01:13:19.000It's a state law and that is a real sickness when people think that they're vindicated or justified in some way for locking those people in cages.
01:13:36.000And the hypocrisy is just so outstanding in everywhere, in every bar, in every drugstore, everywhere you go there's alcohol, and yet you're going to lock these people in a cage for doing something that's not nearly as bad.
01:13:54.000But the thing is, the people see through this.
01:13:57.000The fact that you could get this vote in Washington, Colorado, is a very hopeful thing.
01:14:03.000If they will let it go forward, then over time they'll begin to see the benefits of that, in the sense that, exactly as you say, We're good to go.
01:14:35.000Letting people smoke pot alleviates a lot of societal problems.
01:14:39.000It won't eliminate them, but you'll see statistically significant reductions in a lot of the parameters.
01:14:47.000Because we know that alcohol fuels violent behavior.
01:14:53.000It fuels domestic violence, traffic accidents, all this stuff.
01:14:58.000Those things will be reduced if people start smoking pot in place of that.
01:15:05.000I guess I'm just disappointed in the fact that it's taken so long that I've become kind of cynical, the way the government approaches it, because it just seems so ridiculous at this point.
01:15:20.000I mean it's like this policy has so long been in place and there's so much inertia behind it, right?
01:15:26.000There's the whole law enforcement infrastructure, the DEA, the prison industrial complex, the – I mean so many things depend on – It's not just the drug cartels, and their profits go away,
01:15:42.000but the whole governmental infrastructure to support the...
01:16:30.000Although they do everything they can to discourage research.
01:16:35.000Out of one side of their mouth, they say, well, we want people to apply for grants and we encourage research, but then they make it impossible to get legitimate sources of cannabis to do the research.
01:16:54.000I would say that we have to remember, we have to take a longer term Sort of view of this, and we have to remind ourselves that we're witnessing a...
01:17:06.000What is really going on here is a co-evolution, you know, between us and these plants.
01:17:13.000And this has been going on for, we don't know how long, a hundred thousand years at least.
01:17:19.000Cannabis is among those plants, right?
01:17:24.000If you take a small slice of historical time and say, what is our current, you know, species relationship with these plants?
01:17:33.000It doesn't look very good, you know, they're being suppressed and all that.
01:18:13.000And so many people have had to suffer needlessly, people that are in jail now who don't belong there.
01:18:20.000There's a terrible case about a guy in Montana who was a grower who was following the state law, even had state law enforcement authorities on a regular basis come out to his grow houses and he showed them what he was doing.
01:18:31.000He was providing for all these different patients in Montana and this guy's up for 80 years in jail.
01:18:37.000He's up for more in jail than he would be if he killed somebody.
01:18:43.000Jail is 25 to life for murder, and this guy is – it's 80 years is his potential sentence.
01:19:12.000Now, as a man of science, and you clearly are, how do you feel when you see, like, CNN and you see, like, Dr. Drew talking all this craziness on CNN about...
01:19:24.000Withdrawal symptoms and withdrawal syndromes, he was saying, from cannabis use and about the cannabis today is so much stronger than it was when we were younger.
01:20:02.000Ignore all these people that are quoting all these positive things and focus on what is most likely bullshit.
01:20:11.000If you go by personal experience, like what we all know, if someone is having psychotic episodes because of marijuana, I have got to think they're going to have psychotic episodes anyway.
01:20:21.000I got to think marijuana just got them there, but they were already fucked.
01:20:24.000I mean, I would have to assume, just knowing my own personal experience with a drug.
01:20:29.000When someone who hasn't had an experience with a drug and they're talking about it, it's maddening.
01:22:44.000It's about empowering people to make informed decisions about what kind of substances they're going to use, under what circumstances, what their intentions are.
01:23:33.000It's human behavior is what we need to focus on and that's what drug education doesn't focus on.
01:23:40.000It talks about the drugs almost as though they were demons or pathogens or like they had some kind of independent existence and they were an evil virus or something.
01:24:47.000We expect people to learn how to drive a car.
01:24:52.000We encourage responsible drinking, whatever that is.
01:24:57.000So in that one instant, we encourage responsible usage.
01:25:02.000Not that people use it in a responsible way.
01:25:06.000Well, I think we're big on people figuring out shit for themselves, which is why we send people out into the world essentially with almost no knowledge whatsoever about sex and love.
01:25:14.000When you're young, you just sort of have to stumble into it at your most vulnerable and confused time.
01:25:32.000That's a joke and what's also a joke is just the raising of human beings.
01:25:38.000I think so many people in this country are being raised by people who are essentially children their entire life.
01:25:43.000They never really did develop A true understanding of themselves or their place in the world or an objective sense of this whole thing and the great mystery of it all that's never conveyed and then they raise children.
01:25:56.000The children have to somewhere or another wake up and go, okay, nobody knows what the fuck is really going on here.
01:26:01.000We live in a world of madness and momentum, and it just continues in the same path, even though everyone knows it's crazy.
01:26:07.000But can you imagine, I mean, how many people can step out of that framework?
01:26:16.000You know, if you grow up, if you're raised in a religious household, you know, especially a fundamentalist household, you're not encouraged to think about very much, right?
01:27:09.000And instead of all these different ideas of what we're supposed to do and not supposed to do and what is evil and what is good, We've lost the ability to figure out what kind of an impact what we're doing has on other people and judging that first and foremost.
01:27:25.000And that, I think, is very much a religious and a psychedelic principle.
01:27:30.000That idea, the idea of looking at everything as how it's affecting the other people around you first.
01:27:37.000And if you did that, no one would ever impose that kind of restrictions on your children.
01:27:42.000Because if you were truly looking at the development of the children, the first thing you'd say is, well, I don't want to fuck this kid up.
01:28:32.000Who makes a profession out of stepping out of the box or trying to look at things from, you know, a broader perspective.
01:28:39.000But if you're a person who, you know, I mean, if you were raised in a strict religious household, chances are your children are going to be raised in that household and you never really look, you know, you never take the blinders off because you know there's all sorts of bad stuff out there and you just don't want to know about it.
01:29:04.000The problem is the predetermined patterns of thinking.
01:29:07.000One of the things I like to say, I think psychedelics are extremely valuable With respect to, you know, sometimes I talk about faith.
01:29:19.000One of the things that's interesting about psychedelics is they don't require faith, right?
01:29:24.000I mean, religious belief, religious tenets are usually postulated on this idea that here's a whole bunch of things that you should believe, and there's not a shred of evidence for any of this, but you must have faith, my son, right?
01:30:05.000You can just have what you need to have is courage.
01:30:08.000But what do you say to the people, the cynics, the people who would look at the psychedelic experiences and say, okay, you are glorifying and you're over-exaggerating what's essentially a hallucination.
01:30:23.000Your visual cortex is being bombarded with these foreign chemicals.
01:30:27.000You're seeing things that aren't there.
01:30:30.000And all this is is just your brain's need to make something profound out of what's essentially a malfunction.
01:30:38.000A malfunction of your thinking, a malfunction of your visuals.
01:30:42.000And you've sort of attached all this importance to it after the experience is over.
01:30:47.000Yeah, that's the cynical point of view.
01:30:48.000But to that I would reply that what we call ordinary reality, ordinary consciousness, even consensus reality, is essentially a hallucination.
01:31:02.000The reason drugs work is because we're made of drugs.
01:31:06.000And whether or not we're on drugs or not, our brains are creating this reality, which we know does not resemble the real world, whatever that is.
01:31:17.000I mean, the instruments of our physics and so on tell us that the world is a quantum world.
01:31:26.000A lot of what our brain does is synthesize a hallucination, essentially, create a model of the world that we proceed to live in.
01:31:39.000I mean, the world that you and I share and everyone shares, this is a model of the world.
01:31:45.000This is a model reality, not the real reality.
01:31:49.000Is completely unknowable and will always remain so.
01:31:53.000So for people to say, well, you've just, yeah, you've disturbed your brain chemistry in a novel way and you've tuned into a different channel, essentially, but you're still working with a model, whether it's a model of the...
01:32:08.000We're all experienced through the lens of a drug or whether it's experienced through the lens of, you know, sober conscious perception.
01:32:16.000It's still a biochemical artifact in a sense.
01:32:23.000We live inside of it, you know, and that's...
01:32:28.000So that's what I would say to those people, that it's not that...
01:32:34.000There is some kind of objective reality which we're immersed in when we're not on drugs.
01:32:41.000It's more that we're on drugs all the time.
01:32:45.000Our brain is an organ that happens to churn out drugs, which we call neurotransmitters and hormones, and that's what our brains run on.
01:32:57.000So all you do when you take an external drug is you tweak one or more of those sets of receptors that the neurons are talking to, and you get a slightly distorted signal from what we have come to accept as ordinary reality.
01:33:15.000There is no ordinary reality, or we don't know what it is.
01:33:19.000It's forever unknowable in terms of our subjective experience.
01:33:46.000But we have this real need, a lot of people, to discount the things that happen, to discount the vision of the psychedelic experience, the hallucinations, the visuals, the profound impact and the sounds.
01:34:01.000Even though those are experiences that you are taking in as an individual, as a human being, as an entity, you're taking those in, they're dismissed.
01:34:10.000They're discounted because you can't hit them.
01:34:31.000I mean, I think that's a lot of what psychedelic art does and these sort of creative...
01:34:37.000It's not that people go out and take psychedelic drugs and never produce anything.
01:34:44.000Those experiences influence them profoundly.
01:34:48.000And you may not be able to exactly reproduce them, but given the technologies that we have access to, you can come pretty darn close with multimedia technologies and computer graphics and all this stuff.
01:35:40.000Scary, but also within the realm of possibility.
01:35:43.000That's the scary part, is that it's not just science fiction.
01:35:46.000One of the fascinating concepts that Terence had was the concept of the singularity as he saw it, you know, the technological singularity.
01:35:56.000A little bit different than the way Kurzweil and a lot of these futurists saw it.
01:35:59.000He thought it was very likely going to be a time machine or something along those lines, something that will They'll be created where there's a new technology where time ceases to be linear.
01:36:15.000I mean, we love to play with that idea.
01:36:19.000And, you know, in fact, we used to, you know, Terry used to speculate that, you know, at 2012 that the singularity will be Triggered the moment that time travel is invented.
01:36:33.000And everyone after that will, of course, want to migrate back to the original moment when time travel was invented.
01:36:42.000So suddenly there'll be all these time machines condensing out of nowhere.
01:36:52.000No one can even wrap their head around that idea, that infinite Time and distance into the future would all be able to access the moment the first time machine was invented.
01:37:39.000My thought about human ingenuity and our constant desire for innovation is that I don't ever see it stopping.
01:37:46.000It seems to be a part of what the human animal is and what it does here.
01:37:50.000So if someone like, I do not remember his name, the guy out of University of Connecticut, he's the lead time travel expert He's a really fascinating character.
01:38:20.000But his, Ronald Mallet, his idea, I think, was that once he had really thoroughly researched time travel, he realized that you would never be able to go back before the moment of time machine was invented.
01:38:36.000You're never going to be able to go backwards.
01:40:33.000I find it amazing that we've been able to, for the most part, not destroy ourselves with nuclear power, because nuclear power, in a lot of the ways, the biggest impact it has is not just powering cities, but destroying them.
01:40:46.000The fact that we've sort of figured out a way to put a cap on that, And really, despite all the conflict in the world, we haven't had a nuclear event like that since the 1940s.
01:40:57.000I wonder how much more evolved we would have to be to be responsible for the actual use of a time machine.
01:41:04.000I mean, how much more evolved would we have to be before we could have something like that?
01:41:08.000It wouldn't be the president has access to the button.
01:41:11.000It would be, you know, the president has access to the hole in the universe.
01:41:14.000You know, I mean, how do we decide whether or not we're going to do this?
01:41:19.000How do we decide who we go back in time and save?
01:41:21.000You know, when events happen in the news, do we have like a congressional meeting?
01:41:25.000Do we go back in time and save this person?
01:41:27.000Well, the thing is, I mean, I think that's a misunderstanding of the nature of time, right?
01:41:34.000I mean, if I mean, one of the reasons time travel is impossible, supposedly, that kind of time, is because you can't do those things.
01:41:44.000You can't go back and prevent the Kennedy assassination, you know, because you proliferate another timeline and things take at least one more.
01:41:54.000But then, you know, physicists tell us, I mean, the current theory is everything you do precipitates, you know, It proliferates multiple timelines.
01:42:04.000Please explain that, because Duncan and I have been trying to wrap our heads around that one, and we've brought it up to each other a couple of times.
01:42:10.000It's sort of an abstract idea in my head, but every decision you make literally creates a different universe.
01:42:20.000And not only every decision you ever make, if I understand it, it extends to, you know, every collapse of a waveform, every, you know, collision of atoms, every event, every event, no matter how minuscule or insignificant that we're not even aware of proliferates multiple,
01:43:34.000Because if you existed in some sort of a logical continuum of real objective thought and reasoning, and you had to exist in life in today, in the human world in 2012...
01:44:33.000What evidence is this that the brain detects consciousness?
01:44:36.000Well, all of the evidence of non-ordinary states.
01:44:40.000You know, these other dimensions that for shamanism and for psychedelics they present as real.
01:44:47.000I mean, does the brain dream all those up?
01:44:50.000Why are there commonalities between those states, you know, between people?
01:44:55.000I mean, you don't have to be fans of Terence and Dennis McKenna to take DMT and have similar experiences, you know, to us.
01:45:05.000So I think I just don't think that we really have a definitive way to say that all of what we experience arises from the brain.
01:45:17.000It's more that consciousness is built into the structure of space-time in a certain way, and our brains are detectors and processors, much in the way that television is a detector of a signal,
01:45:35.000Takes in the signal, processes it in a way that's comprehensible, and puts it out there on the screen.
01:45:41.000So the ego and the personality and the lifestyle you choose and what have you as you're making your way through this dimension is essentially just clothing that you wear to shield you from the great outdoors of reality.
01:46:36.000And that's one of the more profound aspects of the psychedelic experience is the stripping away of that personality and culture and everything and getting to some weird, strange source, getting to this strange thing that exists, this clear thought without all...
01:46:52.000For a minute, you get to turn the circuit board over.
01:47:01.000There's big, useful, interesting things about psychedelics and particularly DMT. DMT just rips the curtain back and you get to see the raw data of experience and how it's everything.
01:47:19.000Memories, people you talk to, fragments of songs, just whatever things are swimming around in your head.
01:47:29.000You sort of see, they're all going into, you know, through this funnel or something, and it's coming out all taped together some way, and that kind of a coherent picture of reality.
01:47:42.000You get to step, you get to see it from the other side, briefly, how it's working, you know, the reality-generating machine, if you will.
01:47:54.000That's what you see on DMT. What are your thoughts on alien abductions and UFO experiences?
01:48:03.000Do you think that these are endogenous dumps of DMT? That it's most likely what these people are experiencing is some sort of an overflow or something?
01:48:19.000You know, I think that Strassman's work on this where high doses of DMT can, you know, in some people, reliably induce these abduction type encounters.
01:48:34.000Well, we know they're not, you know, standing beside a highway in New Mexico and watching a UFO land.
01:48:41.000They're in a hospital bed, you know, with an IV installed, but they're having these types of experiences.
01:48:47.000For those who don't know what you're talking about, it's Rick Strassman's work.
01:48:50.000It's a book called DMT, The Spirit Molecule.
01:48:53.000It's all about clinical studies and things he did with DMT. Clinical studies with DMT. And Strassman reported that in many of his subjects who were given high doses of DMT, they had experiences that were...
01:49:08.000Similar, if not identical, to the classic alien abduction type experiences.
01:49:15.000So then you do think that that's what these people are having.
01:49:17.000They're having endogenous dumps while they're sleeping.
01:49:19.000It's just something's happening and that's...
01:51:02.000Do you think that the DMT could possibly, I mean, this is complete speculation, but act as a doorway where an actual, real, true entity can come through so these people that are having these UFO abduction experiences, even if they are still lying in their bed, they are actually still having this real experience.
01:51:22.000I mean, and if you talk to shamans, people that deliberately induce these states for exactly this reason, to communicate with these non-human intelligences that give them useful information about all kinds of things,
01:51:38.000I mean, the shamans are just matter of fact about it.
01:51:41.000And they'll just say, well, yeah, what did you think it was?
01:52:40.000He used to, when he was taking mushrooms, do exactly this.
01:52:44.000Get this I-Thou dialogue going with the mushroom and insist that the mushroom tell him something that he couldn't possibly know.
01:52:56.000And the mushroom was always very cagey about it and didn't cough it up.
01:53:02.000It was like, well, if I tell you that, you won't need me.
01:53:05.000That sounds like the imagination to me.
01:53:07.000I mean, if I was the cynic, I would say, well, that's obviously your imagination then because it can't concoct anything that doesn't exist or something you wouldn't possibly know.
01:53:14.000It doesn't have the resources because it's coming from your own mind.
01:54:20.000As long as you don't begin to postulate that this actually, you know, describes the structure of time, I mean, that's where I have a problem with it.
01:54:29.000Because for one thing, you know, time wave zero completely ignores relativity.
01:54:34.000And all the aspects of time that go into that.
01:55:45.000In other words, Terence or whoever created the time wave theory never defined, these are the criteria that will invalidate this theory, right?
01:55:56.000And science depends on In order to qualify as a theory, you have to say, what's going to invalidate it?
01:56:05.000What are the criteria that's going to take the foundations out from under this theory?
01:56:11.000That either means you have to chuck the theory completely, or you have to modify it so the model fits the data better, right?
01:56:20.000And he was never able to, or he never...
01:56:25.000And I don't think he was really able to define what would invalidate the theory.
01:56:44.000It's useful as an idea, but in some ways it's not.
01:56:50.000I mean, you know, if you want it to be scientific, if you want to call this a theory in the scientific sense, you have to define what's going to disprove it.
01:56:59.000When I meant that science can't disprove things, what I meant is they can't disprove really unique events like the idea of a UFO actually existing and then disappearing.
01:57:07.000Once it's here and gone, if there's no physical evidence, how can you disprove a unique event like that?
01:57:25.000I mean, I always thought that what J. Allen Hynek, the famous UFO researcher, said about UFOs, he said, I don't know if UFOs are real or not, but I know absolutely 100% that UFO experiences are real.
01:58:01.000Assigned by the government to go and research different UFO sightings and somewhere along the line, he decided, listen man, I'm going to just do this.
01:58:09.000And he stopped working for the government and just started spending all of his time researching UFOs.
01:58:14.000But he was always clear that what he was investigating were UFO experiences because that was the data That he had to work with, you know, and that's absolutely 100% true.
01:58:28.000UFO experiences do occur, whether those are...
01:58:34.000Confabulations of the mind or whether they're extraterrestrial origin, extradimensional origin.
02:00:00.000Well, in some sense, we're still high from it, because that experience, you're always integrating it.
02:00:07.000I mean, it's rather strange to me that...
02:00:10.000You know, it's like that was 1971, so that was 40 years ago.
02:00:17.000And one of the more interesting things that Terence said about psilocybin, which was a real mind blower, was, first of all, how closely it relates to normal human neurochemistry.
02:00:29.000That psilocybin is like almost exactly the same as chemicals that our own brain produces and very alien in that form.
02:00:39.000The form that it exists, whatever the molecule structure of psilocybin is, it's the only similar...
02:00:46.000The way it exists, there's not something similar to it, or there's not something like it that exists in the organic world other than our own brain chemistry?
02:01:10.000DMT is all over the place and a lot of its derivatives, but psilocybin and psilocin do not occur, as far as we know, outside the fungal world, outside the world of mushrooms.
02:01:25.000Maybe it will be discovered in a higher plant tomorrow or next week, but I kind of doubt it.
02:01:34.000I don't want to get too much into the chemistry, but I do think that this touches on another remarkable aspect of our universe, of biological being,
02:01:51.000which is that these tryptamines, DMT, 5-methoxy-DMT, bufotinine, psilocybin, psilocin, DMT itself is two steps from tryptophan.
02:02:04.000Tryptophan is an amino acid that is universal.
02:02:06.000It's part of the 20 that go into proteins.
02:02:09.000So it's an essential molecule of life, tryptophan is.
02:02:13.000The enzymes that convert tryptophan to DMT, there are two primary enzymes.
02:02:31.000I don't know if your audience cares about this, but the point is two trivial steps from tryptophan leads to DMT, right?
02:02:44.000You know, the biosphere is saturated with DMT. It's not an uncommon chemical at all.
02:02:52.000It's found in probably thousands of plants.
02:03:01.000I mean, I don't know what it means except, you know, stepping away from science for a minute, strict science, but thinking maybe this is a kind of a subtle message that nature is trying to Send to the monkeys?
02:03:23.000If I remember what Terence said, what he was alluding to was that psilocybin may have come here from an asteroid, that it could survive in a vacuum.
02:04:07.000Panspermia is how they believe that amino acids and essential building blocks from life may have traveled here from asteroids and that may be how life is seeded on this planet.
02:04:16.000Or, I mean, I suggest in the book, actually people have to read the book because I unpack this.
02:04:23.000I actually Have a section in the book called Reflections on Monterey.
02:04:28.000And I, trying to Not only unpack it for the reader, but try and look at it myself from the standpoint of four years hence, you know, after the experience and say, what was going on and what makes sense and what might have been going on?
02:04:46.000Was it simply two, you know, nerdy guys who went to the Amazon, took too many drugs and had, you know, these experiences and that end of story?
02:04:58.000Or was there really something else going on?
02:05:00.000And the whole This issue touches on what we were talking about, about the potential evolutionary significance of mushrooms.
02:05:09.000And it may be that what we are is a million-year, multi-million-year long biotechnology experiment, essentially, where if a Super technological civilization,
02:05:28.000biotechnological civilization with plenty of time on its hands and a certain perspective, if they wanted to take an ecology and see what happened when they seeded these molecules into the ecology, you know,
02:05:57.000Kind of, I guess, create the conditions where intelligence and consciousness could arise and then see what the effects were in a certain sense.
02:06:17.000Something along those lines, you know, where if you...
02:06:21.000Seed the ecology with tryptophan and the enzymes, then this thing is going to be all over the place.
02:06:29.000And then, you know, and probably predate the appearance of complex nervous systems.
02:06:37.000But, you know, we know, for example, that the serotonin receptors are evolutionarily the oldest receptors that we know, the oldest neurotransmitter receptors.
02:07:12.000But you yourself, knowing so much about biology, looking at the complex processes that occur on this planet that are completely...
02:07:19.000I wouldn't say they're orchestrated by nature...
02:07:22.000But just the parasitic relationships, the really complex ones that parasites have, like the aquatic water worm that gets inside of a grasshopper, grows, then convinces the grasshopper to commit suicide so it can be born into the water.
02:07:36.000I mean, we know about these weird, crazy relationships that exist.
02:08:48.000So why is it so far-fetched to think that there is a galactic, you know, super race or maybe it's, you know.
02:08:58.000That infects, you know, complex nervous systems in our ecology that then induces us to, you know, invent culture and language and technology and eventually build starships and get off this butt ball.
02:09:53.000The thing is that we should even be here.
02:09:56.000I mean, one of Terence's favorite phrases, and I think it's true, we should always remember what J.B.S. Haldane said, you know, the universe is not only stranger than you suppose, it's stranger than you can suppose.
02:10:11.000I love that quote, and I love that he used to say queer.
02:10:14.000Yeah, actually, I was going to say, actually he said queer, but we can't use that term.
02:10:19.000Isn't that funny that they took queer?
02:10:21.000They took queer, but that's what he said.
02:11:57.000It's like, you could say, well, I don't know shit, and I feel really stupid, but it also clears the decks to appreciate things and remind ourselves that we don't know very much, but it clears the decks for learning.
02:12:18.000Accept the position that you don't know shit and then enjoy all the information there is to take in and all the fascination and the wonder.
02:12:25.000Too many people are trying to control the position and they're trying to control it and pretend that they do know shit.
02:12:55.000The way we think about it is the way it is.
02:12:58.000And anybody who challenges that is a heretic.
02:13:03.000Now, how long did it take you after La Torreira before you jumped back on the horse?
02:13:08.000It seems like if I got smeared across the entire cosmos for a couple weeks and I don't remember how I shit or smoke cigarettes, I might just fucking quit, okay?
02:14:11.000A lot of it, the reason it happened was because we set ourselves up into this...
02:14:20.000You know, conceptual or I don't know what you call it, cognitive box.
02:14:24.000We set ourselves, we painted ourselves into this corner in terms of our predictions about what was going to happen, you know, because it was all about time, right?
02:14:37.000And so when we were leading up to doing the experiment, We thought that, well, the reason all this strange stuff is happening is because a few hours up ahead in the future, we've done the experiment,
02:14:55.000And so what we're getting is the backwash from the future, like approaching a singularity.
02:15:01.000You know, we were getting the backwash from the future, and that's why it's warping reality.
02:15:05.000It literally is warping reality as we approach this thing.
02:15:10.000So we went into it with the attitude that something had to happen, something physics-shattering, and we were trying to overturn, literally, the laws of physics.
02:15:20.000We came into it with the idea that something had to happen, and guess what?
02:15:45.000experience of Terence and myself where we were linked and we understood that one person is we were becoming mirror images of each other almost like a photograph and it's negative and one entity was going forward in time and another was going backward in time and I mean,
02:16:07.000we had a whole framework where it made sense.
02:16:26.000Did you have a lot of experiences or any experiences where you saw ancient motifs, whether it was hieroglyphs or...
02:16:35.000Egyptian or I've heard people that say they've seen Aramaic or Arab type writing and what seems to be maybe perhaps the experiences of other people that have taken these same sort of psychedelic drugs and that it's a stored collected experience.
02:16:53.000I know that was one of the things that Terence believed.
02:16:56.000That when you are taking psilocybin, you're not just taking psilocybin, you're sort of conjoining the experiences of everybody who's ever taken that drug ever.
02:18:29.000Do you think that that also explains why in the ayahuasca experience there's a lot of jaguars and a lot of snakes and a lot of that type of...
02:18:40.000Because to them, that's the dimension.
02:18:42.000That's the dimension that's real for those people.
02:19:12.000If you look at the paintings of Pablo Emeringo, for example, or others, you know, I mean, he had this ability to paint that realm as best he recollected it.
02:19:23.000But that's a tremendous contribution because he provided a window, you know, into that cosmology.
02:19:28.000You can sort of look into that conceptual place without actually taking ayahuasca.
02:19:39.000In Pablo's iconography, all of these spirits that you see and UFOs, incidentally, and plants and animals and all that, they all have names.
02:19:50.000These are not things that he dreamed up.
02:19:52.000These are part of that cosmos that he is able to depict.
02:20:33.000Yeah, when a guy can do that, like Alex Gray especially, some of his images, they appear Egyptian, they appear DMT slash Egyptian.
02:20:43.000And I've always wondered, what is that that you're seeing when you're seeing this sort of ancient motif?
02:20:53.000It seems, for whatever reason, it seems like a crazy assertion that you're accessing the experiences of all these people that have ever done this drug.
02:21:02.000But is it any weirder than cell phones?
02:21:06.000Is that any weirder than the ability to Google something?
02:21:11.000Is it any weirder than the Hobbit in 3D? I mean, you could say, yeah, you could say, you know, well, it's a similar experience because these mushrooms activate the same receptors in everybody, and we all have a similar brain architecture and all that, and I think that to a certain extent that's part of it,
02:21:32.000I mean, again, that comes back to whether, you know, The brain is generating this stuff or whether it's actually, you know, sort of just making the membrane thinner so that you can look at it.
02:21:43.000Did you have any experience with sensory deprivation tanks?
02:21:48.000I haven't had very much with that, no.
02:22:27.000Eating cannabis and getting to the point where you're The way I try to describe it is when you're so high that you feel like the parallel dimension, the neighboring dimension is like a waterfall and you've got your nose touching the water and you're right about to push through the other side,
02:24:29.000I don't want to be blasted out of my head in that thing and then have something go wrong and you open the door and reality just hasn't tuned back in yet.
02:25:27.000But even just, like I said, by itself, just for relaxation.
02:25:30.000But I just never understood why more people didn't want to have that just as a meditation tool, as a tool for completely getting alone with your thoughts and just separating yourself from any of the input of the body.
02:26:24.000But what was incredible was that he would just...
02:26:28.000Go up there and wind them up, put them on the stage, put them in front of the microphone, and he would just go on for hours and hours and hours.
02:26:38.000I mean, I'm sure he would credit cannabis for a lot of that, you know, his inspiration.
02:26:45.000What he was doing was essentially what he used to do.
02:26:50.000I mean, back before anybody knew about him or us or whatever, Back in the Berkeley days, in the 60s, he loved nothing more than to get a bunch of people in a room, pass around You know,
02:27:25.000a lot of people, they smoke A lot of cannabis, they get quiet, right?
02:27:36.000And then he found not only, you know, if it works for a bedroom full of people on his, you know, in his hippie crash pad on Telegraph Avenue, it'll work for audiences all over the world.
02:27:47.000So he turned it into Thank God he did as well because those recordings and the books and the lectures,
02:28:04.000those experiences changed The entire direction of a lot of people's lives, including mine.
02:28:28.000It was unbelievably profound, that ability to relay those thoughts in this really compelling way.
02:28:35.000I mean, I can't tell you how many gigs I've gone on, where I had to travel or I had to drive, and I just listened to a psychedelic salon, listened to one of the lectures.
02:28:45.000So compelling and fascinating, and I think that opens up completely new lines of thinking for a lot of people.
02:28:52.000And, you know, it's interesting, The currency that this has, he's still out there.
02:28:59.000He's achieved this weird kind of immortality on the net.
02:29:03.000What he said, when you think about most of this was early 90s stuff when he was talking about this, but you can put a tape on, and it's just as timely as though it were uttered yesterday.
02:30:20.000I think it's really, really important for recognizing his true contributions and recognizing that, like all of us, he's a human being who is experimenting with all these ideas.
02:30:30.000And sometimes they weren't correct, but that's the only way you get to those ideas.
02:30:34.000They have to sort of evolve and form and you have to keep playing with them.
02:30:38.000In the nature of that, in the nature of full disclosure, if there's any glaring errors that he had made that people have either repeated or that they have misinformation because of these glaring errors, what would it be?
02:31:36.000Well, when you said earlier that he would say something, and you said, well, that didn't make any sense, and you contradicted what you said earlier, do you have any specific...
02:31:45.000Well, he would always respond to that.
02:31:47.000He didn't like me to go to his seminars so much because I was the only one that would ever challenge him.
02:31:52.000Everyone else is listening in sort of slack-jawed fascination of his uttering these completely wild ideas.
02:32:01.000And I was the only one who would really ever get up and say, well, what you said 20 minutes ago doesn't make any sense and it contradicts what you say now.
02:32:10.000He would respond with, well, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, right?
02:34:14.000I mean, they're like the people, you know, they're like the Dutch lens makers who built telescopes, but, you know, refused to look through the telescopes because that was a blasphemous act, right?