Daniel Pinchbeck explores psychedelics as tools for consciousness expansion, debunking government propaganda like CIA-falsified WMD claims in Iraq and the Utah Supreme Court’s peyote ruling, while linking DMT’s five-minute "alternate reality" trips to superstring theory and warning of unguided risks. His 2012 book ties Mayan prophecies to forced human evolution via psychic and material destruction—Amazon deforestation, overfishing—criticizing literal apocalyptic views while citing sacramental ayahuasca protections under UN-backed Brazilian churches. Pinchbeck contrasts ceremonial use (e.g., Santo Daime’s "machine elves") with reckless experimentation, advocating for indigenous frameworks to mitigate trauma and harness healing, like ibogaine’s addiction-receptor reset or salvia’s Mazatec-guided visions. Ultimately, he frames psychedelics as a suppressed path to understanding deeper realities, urging cautious integration over cultural dismissal. [Automatically generated summary]
man immigrated and joined the marines for financial reasons corporal wasfali hussoon was doing well recovering at a u.s motor hospital in germany after being flown out of lebanon on friday so nobody really knows exactly what happened here did he did he well they just don't know uh strange he would turn up in lebanon but now that a senate committee has concluded the CIA
falsely claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, expect more caution on Capitol Hill the next time a president seeks approval for preemptive military action, but don't expect America to strike only after an attack.
Even the harshest critics of the Bush administration's policy of preemption say the U.S. must act in the face of a clear threat.
Oh, by the way, I wonder if any of you can confirm this for me.
I'll be watching for it.
A friend of mine told me there's going to be a 3.01 a.m. Pacific time launch from Vandenberg, a pretty big rocket going into orbit and taking a satellite into orbit.
And so I don't know it for sure, but I'm certainly going to wander out onto the porch at about 3.01 and see if I can see something ascending into the heavens.
Does anybody know if that schedule is on?
If so, I'll let the audience know.
3.01 a.m. Pacific Time from Vandenberg, or if that has now changed, I'd be certainly very, very interested.
And so if any of you have the schedule or know what's going to happen, just give me a quick, fast blast, and we'll take it from there.
The End Curtis of Valdosta, California says, me and my wife got a chance finally to see the movie Day After Tomorrow.
We thought it was excellent.
Hope to see more to come.
Curtis and Patricia, thanks.
Well, the Day After Tomorrow is doing very well indeed.
In fact, worldwide, it already has topped the $500 million mark.
That's incredible.
Absolutely incredible.
DVD sale, well, it's still in theaters, and then DVD sales will come.
Actually, it's, believe it or not, the day after tomorrow now is, I think, like number 35 or 34 or something like that, worldwide.
All-time movies.
Of all-time gross, what they have is some list of the gross a movie makes, you know, worldwide.
All-time movies.
I mean, for all of moviedom, all of time, period, over $500 million in number 35 or something like that, all-time.
That's incredible.
Absolutely incredible.
So there is a lot of weather-related news.
That's probably one reason why an awful lot of people want to see it, because people know inside they know the change is going on.
Dr. Reese Halter, the president of Global Forest Science, says that prolonged drought conditions have created a once-in-a-400-year fire threat for British Columbia's coastal forests.
Expect a lot of this stuff, folks.
He says the last time this province was this dry was more than four centuries ago with disastrous results.
It cooperates with the long drought in the 1580s when we had coastal forests ablaze, he said.
He warns the evidence shows wildfires of 2003 could be just a warm-up for worse things to come.
All the evidence goes to show that it could be as bad, and the shift may go from the interior to the coast, he said.
Walter also warns the mountain pine beetle infestation in north-central BC has created vast areas of tinder-dry forest, compounding the potential risk.
At some critical point, the stars, as it were, all are going to line up, and there's going to be a really big fire in British Columbia.
And I've got some friends that I talk to on ham radio in BC.
And, you know, there are times when their temperatures exceed ours down here in the desert.
Bear in mind, I'm about 25 miles from Death Valley, and they named it that for a reason.
Look around the rest of the world.
The Guardian, the first sign that anything was amiss came just after about 11.30 a.m.
This is a Thursday, July 8th story in the Guardian.
The skies got dark.
The temperature plummeted, and the first raindrops began to fall on the fishing villages along the Devon coast.
Within an hour, winds were up to 60 miles an hour, and by late afternoon, the storm had swept across southern England and hit London.
It had happened.
If it had happened, for example, in October or November, why nobody would have batted an eyelid, but not this time of year.
Falling trees with their summer canopies of leaves catching the full force of the wind, brought down power lines, left more than 13,000 homes without electricity across Kent, Sussex, and Surrey.
While they predicted fallen temperatures, led British Gas to put its winter emergency contingency plan into operation as it prepared for a surge in demand with people switching on their central heating.
Their central heating in July, folks, in England.
I'm telling you, I'm telling you, look for a lot more of this.
There are now more sunspots than there have been in the last 1,000 years.
This could be a cause of global warming.
Also, vast areas of cold water have suddenly appeared in the North Pacific and the North Atlantic, meaning we could be on our way to a superstorm.
This coming from Whitley Streeber's unknown country, oceanographers are racing to study the unexpected event.
It is possible that this is happening because the great oscillation that moves ocean water from the north to the south is weakening and getting smaller.
This new abnormality suggests that the situation is getting worse, much worse, much more quickly than anybody anticipated.
Should it persist, it will result in a very early autumn in the northern hemisphere, which will be accompanied by very violent weather.
But would it or could it trigger a really big storm like portrayed in Superstorm in the day after tomorrow?
Well, not unless tropical air penetrates deep into the Arctic in August, should air temperatures at quick watch high Arctic monitoring points soar to above 85 degrees Fahrenheit in August or September, and the conditions now present in the northern ocean persist, the extreme weather could indeed result.
David Whitehouse writes in the BBC News that Swiss researcher Sammy Solanki used ice cores from Greenland to compare today's sunspot activity with that of the past.
Seems over the last century, as the Earth's climate has become warmer, the number of sunspots has increased.
Now, this trend is being made worse by greenhouse gases, but they are not the only cause of global warming.
Sunspots have been monitored since, did you know this, 1610, shortly after the invention of the telescope, they began, counting.
The sun usually has an 11-year cycle of activity, but this isn't always regular.
Between about 1645 and 1715, there were fewer sunspots than usual on the sun's surface.
At that time, the Earth experienced a long period of cold weather known as the Little Ice Age.
Looking at sunspot activity during the past 15, or make that 1,150 years, Volanqui has found that the Sun has never been as active as it has during the past 60 years.
That's interesting.
The Sun has never been as active as it has during the past 60 years.
However, during the past 20 years, the number of sunspots has remained about the same, yet the average temperature of the Earth has continued to rise.
This, if you want to believe that, could be due to fossil fuel burning or not.
Who knows?
The fact of the matter is, though, the climate is clearly changing, and I'll say it for the millionth time.
There's not much we can do to affect it, even if it's fossil fuels, frankly.
It's already underway, and what we should do is be prepared.
We should begin to anticipate the areas that will no longer grow what they now grow and look for areas where we would plant what we're going to continue to need.
Had Shakespeare been a solar physicist, he may have written Hell hath no fury like the Sun, although the Sun provides the means for life here on Earth.
It does have dark side.
The sun regularly sends massive solar explosions of radioactive plasma with the intensity of a billion megaton bombs.
A billion megaton bombs hurling through the solar system.
And perhaps even more astounding, scientists now have the ability to track that energy billions of miles away thanks to an armada of explorers, including Mars Odyssey, Ulysses, Cassini, and the Voyagers, not to mention solar and Earth orbiting craft.
It was with this unprecedented scientific fleet that scientists observed the events that took place late October and November.
Do you all remember when the sun unleashed the most powerful solar flares ever detected in the history of looking at these things?
I mean, there was a blast.
Thank God it was not directed at Earth, but had it been, there would have been a real collapse.
Even as it was, a sort of timeline emerged tracking the largest of the related coronal mass ejections from the Sun all the way to Voyager, expected to receive the shock blast sometime this month.
They will get it, by the way.
Then on to the helipause, which delineates our solar system from interstellar space, the force of the blast is expected to extend that region by as much as 400 million miles.
All told, about 17 major flares erupted on the Sun during those two weeks.
Boy, they were some rough ones.
The result of energy building up in the Sun's magnetic field lines until they become strained enough to suddenly snap like an overstretched rubber band, the related CME or coronal mass ejection were the largest explosions in the solar system,
capable of launching up to 10 billion tons of electrified gas into space, normally at speeds of one to two million miles an hour, while we're protected, of course, by Earth's magnetosphere and the atmosphere, power grids, radio, and GPS signals, satellites, and astronauts in space are indeed vulnerable.
Unfortunately, effects on Earth from these events were minimal, in effect, a testament to the fleet of monitors that issued warnings as early as october twenty first.
Most Earth orbiting spacecraft were put into safe mode to protect them from the massive onslaught of radiation.
Power grids were safe, with the exception of a blackout in Sweden.
Airplanes were rerouted to a more southern route to move them away from the increased radiation at the pole.
At Mars, the Marie instrument on the Mars Odyssey spacecraft was not as lucky.
Ironically, its task was to better understand solar radiation on Mars.
It understands quite a bit now.
It was able to make observations up until the powerful October 28th CME overheated a power converter and it no longer works.
The Hubble Space Telescope may have discovered as many as 100 new planets orbiting stars in our own galaxy.
Hubble's harvest comes from a sweep of thousands of stars in the dome-like bulge of the Milky Way.
It confirms it would almost double the number of planets known to be circling other stars to about 230.
The discovery is going to lend support to the idea that almost every sun-like star in our galaxy and probably the universe is accompanied by planets.
They're out there.
Stephen Beckwith, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, told BBC News Online, quote, I think this work has the potential to be the most significant advance in discovering extrasolar planetary systems since the first planets were discovered in the mid-1990s, end quote.
So what we've got here is indeed interesting, and it provokes a question.
If, in fact, most of the stars we see, and even with the naked eye on a good dark night, why you can see more than you can count, thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, I don't know.
You can detect from where I live on a good dark night the Milky Way from one end to the other, from one horizon to the other.
It is incredible.
Now, what they're telling us is most, if not all, of those stars have planets surrounding them.
That would mean that life, if life is even, I don't know, fairly common, should be everywhere out there.
There should be planets crawling with life.
I mean, if you've got uncountable stars and then multiply that by uncountable numbers of planets and a very great deal of time that has passed, there should be almost uncountable numbers of civilizations out there with life.
But if they're there, where are they?
We haven't heard a peep.
Not one thing.
I wonder if any of you have thoughts on that.
Even those at SETI, Dr. Shostak and others, are saying publicly now that, you know, if X number of years go by and we don't get some sort of detection of life at some point, SETI's going to have to say something.
Well, you know, we've looked at some percentage of what there is to look at, and we haven't found anything.
Now, I understand that the years when any emerging life might have radio and television and be emitting radio frequency would be, in the larger scheme of things, perhaps very narrow.
But even so, just the numbers alone of civilizations that ought to be out there should be staggering.
And there's just not a peep.
SETI listens.
And of course we have sightings.
You can say, well, Art, you know, there's sightings and there's people that have been snatched up and all the rest of that.
And surely there does seem to be something to that, but it's not ironclad.
Nothing is yet ironclad.
We have no message, no clear, unambiguous contact.
To the point where everybody agrees, yes, we've been contacted.
Yes, there is life out there.
Nothing yet.
And to me, that's incredible.
All those stars.
The Hubble discovering planet after planet to the point where they're now saying, well, planets are common around stars.
Anyway, we're going to do open lines coming up in this next half hour.
And at the top of the next hour, we're going to be talking about psychedelics, mind, drugs.
Daniel Pinchbeck is going to be my guest.
It's going to be a wild night.
So I suggest you buckle in and get ready for the ride.
from the high desert.
I'm Art Bell.
unidentified
Well, I think it's time to generate To realize just what I have found I have been on a tail Of what I am It's all clear to me now My heart is on fire And all your sorrow
It's a beauty It's all clear to me now It's all clear to me now It's all clear to me now You know it don't come easy It's all
clear to me You know it don't come easy Run to play your Jews If you wanna see the blues And you know it don't come easy You don't have to shout or leave the vows You can even play them easy Forget about the past And all your sorrow
The future won't last It will soon be your tomorrow I don't ask the folks I only want to trust And you know it don't come easy Wanna take a ride?
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free 800-825-5033.
From west to the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
International callers may reach ART by calling your in-country sprint access number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903.
From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Those are quite spectacular to watch if you're somewhere on the West Coast, particularly in the southern part of the U.S. Anything that goes up from Vandenberg that big is really something to see.
On the front of the CoastCoastAM.com website right now, there's an article that you can read the whole thing.
It's going to kind of relate to what we're going to talk about tonight.
Last month, apparently, the Utah Supreme Court ruled that peyote can be used by non-Native Americans for religious purposes.
So I guess if, as long as you're saying that you want to have some sort of religious experience.
The way I read this, let's read it again to be sure.
Last month, the Utah Supreme Court ruled that peyote can be used by non-Native Americans for religious purpose.
Now, the entire story is there if you want to read it.
We're going to be talking to Daniel Pinchbeck tonight about not just peyote, but a lot of mind-expanding drugs.
And a lot of people think that's sort of just an artifact of the 60s, and to some degree it is, but there's a lot going on in the modern world, and it'll be a very, very interesting discussion.
He's a very bright guy.
So that's coming up in, I don't know, 20 minutes.
First time, Color Line, you are on the air.
unidentified
Hello.
Hi, Art.
Hi.
Interesting story.
Incident several years ago, but we did some work at Tonopa Auxiliary Airfield, which is, I think it's about 63 miles north, kind of west of Area 51.
So this is something he told you or something you personally observed?
unidentified
No, it's something he told me.
He was in charge of the crew.
He's not into that stuff.
He's never talked about it.
He just told me that it was a very weird experience because they saw lots of things flying there that, you know, the people, the MPs, I guess, would come up and tell them to lay down or put your head in a trash can or whatever.
Well, I do live adjacent to an area here, as you know, where a great deal of development of latest, who knows what generation aircraft are being worked on.
So a lot of things do indeed fly in this area.
And we see a lot of things in the night sky here.
How many can be attributed to our stuff?
Probably most.
How many might be their stuff?
Well, if we have indeed collected from some crash, previous crash, whether it be Roswell or something else, a craft, it would make sense.
We would attempt, certainly, to back engineer to figure out what made it tick, as it were, and to try and fly it.
I enjoyed the discourse this evening, and I have a couple comments.
One, I can remember when Carl Sagan talked about his theoretical postulate that there are billions of stars and then billions and billions of planets and things.
But I would assume now in the last 20 years with the space telescopes, we've been able to chart and at least understand the distribution of light matter to dark matter.
And another question, you mentioned SETI, and years ago I had done some research on the program and also the radio telescopes that were used to, I guess, interpret and to send out radio signals and things and to map, in a sense, parts of the universe.
What I found interesting was the fact that they only focus on a very small, small area.
And I would assume that maybe if they shifted their focus many degrees, there would be a lot more interesting information to be had.
I still want to know why we have not heard from them.
You would imagine there would be many civilizations behind us, perhaps just emerging, crawling up from the lightning-struck mud puddle, and then all the way to what we would consider gods, and all those in between.
Well, we should have caught a few of those in between by now.
Of course, maybe we have.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
unidentified
Hi, Art.
This is Nick from Oak Harbor, and I just wanted to comment about that very subject.
And I'm sure you've heard this before, but I think people need to think about it.
Perhaps we're spending too much time trying to apply our own standards and our own technologies to what some other civilizations might have.
And so we're looking perhaps in the wrong places for the wrong thing.
Well, if you could let your imagination run wild, Nick, and come up with a new way to look, I know they're switching, for example, over to light, from radio to light.
But how else would you look?
unidentified
I don't know that I have the answer to that because I'm not one of them.
But there must be as many different ways of communicating as there are civilizations, probably, or at least quite a few different ways, and we may not even have a clue, which is why I don't have an answer for that, because maybe we don't even have a clue as well.
Well, Nick, if you listen to a lot of people who speak on these subjects, the only thing that appears to go faster than light would seem to be thought.
Now, that may turn out to be the way that we end up communicating with some other life form, maybe at the speed of thought.
I'm really happy you're having Daniel Pinchbeck on for an interview tonight.
I've been trying to spread the word all over on the Intogen forums around the world.
Well, thank you.
I wanted to call when he was on, but I was pretty sure once he gets on, I won't be able to get through.
But one of the things I wanted to tell you, there is a legal herb called salvia divinorum that has been legal, never been made illegal in this country.
It's a rare strain of a salvia plant, and it's been touted to be as strong as peyote or some other illegal substances in some places, obviously Utah, not anymore, according to the state law.
But if people want to do a search on it, they can go on the web and just put in the word salvia and then divinorum, which is spelled D-I-V-I-N-O-R-U-M.
Well, there's a lot of things like that out there.
I know here in the high desert, sir, there are a lot of things that regularly grow in people's front yards.
You know, what you'd think of as weeds or something, and they can be anywhere from substances that will take you on a really wild trip to things that will kill you.
I mean, I had my ride in the 60s, like everybody else did, I suppose.
But have mind-altering drugs, what is their status these days?
I mean, I hear a lot of other drugs, you know, ecstasy and all that kind of baloney going on, but what about psychedelics?
Are they still commonly used in the U.S. by some sort of subculture or not?
unidentified
Yeah, I don't know about the illegal ones because I've steered away from them.
But yes, there are.
There's plenty of legal ones.
There's a huge list of legal hallucinogens.
The most effective, I believe, is the one I'm telling you about, Salvia Divinorum.
But there is a large group of people that is growing larger every year on the Internet with small little forums scattered around the world who are devoted just to this subject.
And the thing is someone wants to look for these groups of people to find out what's going on.
They just got to put in a keyword, entheogen, spelled E-N-T-H-E-O-G-E-N.
Well, I've been studying it for a few years, and I'm fascinated by it because it's really got my attention as a means to spirituality.
I don't know that all of these plants or in cases of some drugs really will lead to a door to open into that dimension, but it appears for some people that some of them can.
Well, I'm very interested in that, sir, and I thank you for the call.
I really am quite interested in that.
In other words, you'll hear people talk about gateway drugs and the negative side of drugs all the way, all the time, right?
But I wonder if some of these drugs, and you will hear people admit it from time to time, that yes, they can be open doors to spiritual experiences that you might not have otherwise.
That's not to say you can't have them without the drugs.
But when honesty prevails, and I've had a lot of guests on it, and they will hesitantly, because of the attitude of the U.S. government about drugs these days, they'll hesitantly admit that they may open doors of that sort.
It's a very interesting subject, and tonight we shall explore it no matter what.
Billions of random events have to happen in order for us to be here now.
And maybe those events haven't happened on those other planets, and the one civilizations that do exist are going to be very, very far behind us or very, very far ahead of us.
Well, that could easily be true of even you could suggest a fairly large percentage, but surely some percentage of those civilizations would have developed.
unidentified
I think life is rare in the universe.
I think life is a very rare thing to find.
You look in our solar system and the conditions have to be just perfect for it to fall right.
I surely would love to establish contact, wouldn't you?
In my lifetime, I would love to see that occur because I have this feeling, just this very strong feeling, that there is life out there, be it rare or be it common.
And I'm beginning to agree with the last caller, that it is rare, very rare, but it's there.
And eventually, we'll connect with them, and then we'll find out we're no longer alone.
Or maybe contact will come in a flash, in a thought, by a brain talking to another brain.
Daniel Pinchbeck is coming up in a moment.
We're going to talk about psychedelic drugs, the state of psychedelic drugs.
He's got a lot to say, and I know a lot of you have been looking forward to this program.
So it's coming up next from the high desert in the middle of the night.
is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
We'll be right back.
Across the streams of hopes and dreams where things are really hot.
Come along if you care.
Come along if you dare.
Take a ride to the land inside of your mind.
To talk with Art Bell, form a wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
From west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
International callers may reach ART by calling your in-country sprint access number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free, 800-893-0903.
From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Can you feel the spirit of the late Terrence McKenna with us this night?
I can.
Daniel Pinchbeck has written for the New York Times magazine, Esquire, The Village Voice, and many other publications.
He is currently writing a column here and now for Arthur, which is a new magazine following in the tradition of the original Rolling Stone.
His book, Breaking Open the Head, chronicles his own investigation of shamanism and psychedelic drugs.
For the book, he underwent an initiation with a West African tribe in Gabon, visited Indians in the Ecuadorian Amazon, as well as in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico.
He also wrote about the Burning Man Festival.
October 2012, the return of prophecies of shamanic and traditional cultures, including the Hopi, classical Maya, Hindu, and Christian apocalyptic traditions.
He believes that these prophecies are telling us something crucial about what's happening in our world today.
They need to be understood properly.
He argues in the book, which is due out, by the way, next summer, that the prophecies describe some sort of phase shift or perhaps transformation into a new form of human consciousness.
Well, that would be a jump, wouldn't it?
The most significant change, he says, since the development of language.
So, in a moment, Daniel Junchback.
Boy, depend on music to provide the right set and setting for what you're about to do.
Listen, you know, a lot of the audience, I'm sure, considers what we're about to talk about to be an archaic artifact of the 60s, not something that really goes on anymore at all.
Psychedelic drugs are just sort of that thing that happened, and it's all over with.
Well, I mean, the way I looked at psychedelics in my book was in Breaking Open the Head, the way I looked in the 60s was that it was kind of like the first stage in a kind of voyage of shamanic initiation.
And it was a very new experience for people at that time.
I mean, it was really only in the sort of 50s that we discovered the mushrooms in Mexico.
LSD was discovered in the 1940s, didn't start getting used until the 50s and 60s.
And it kind of opened this incredible Pandora's box of psychic effects and visions and confusions.
And the society couldn't really deal with it at the time, so the whole thing was radically shut down.
And it's pretty tragic.
In the early 60s, psychedelics were considered to be the most fascinating subject for psychology and philosophy.
And then by the end of the 60s, or mid-70s, I guess people had really just, I think it was almost more like psychic exhaustion, kind of hangover from the 60s.
People couldn't really deal with it.
And, you know, as you mentioned in your introduction, sort of Terrence McKenna then sort of came around and carried the torch after Timothy Leary.
Well, I mean, I think that one reason is that there's a kind of self-propagating bureaucracy.
If you look at the history, I mean, there was alcohol prohibition, I guess, in the 20s.
And when that ended, they had created this huge bureaucracy to deal with alcohol.
They didn't really know what to do with it.
And so then they turned to marijuana.
And then in the 60s, when sort of the hippies and the counterculture and the black radicals became kind of the target for the conservatives, it was very easy to demonize drugs and to kind of use that as a technique of social control.
And if you think about the prison system now, we have millions of people passing through the prison system, a lot of them drug-related.
I'm wondering aside from the fact that the radicals used the drugs, and so they were sort of part of, I don't know, the drive against radicalism in the U.S., there's something more, and I've always thought it had to do with productivity and social versus anti-social behavior, but mostly productivity.
Boy, the government's very concerned about productivity.
I mean, the first aspect is it's a very convenient means of social control.
And when you're dealing with kind of, you know, excess minority, poor population, it's a way of kind of warehousing them in this system.
You know, it's kind of like warehousing excess labor capacity.
And in the meantime, you create this whole industry, this prison, you know, industrial complex.
And so that's one side of it.
And then the other side of it is what it does to those people who actually want to explore consciously their own mind and kind of try to use psychedelics in a beneficial way.
And ju it just makes it very difficult for anybody to undertake that exploration because it's demonized and made illegal.
And so it puts a lot of fear around it.
And that I think is really like fear of the psyche and also fear of the fact that as began to happen in the 60s, open exploration of these areas lead to a very different model of society and might actually.
It gives you a different perspective on your own psyche and on technology and nature and the whole kind of process that we're kind of invested in that we're usually kind of unconscious of.
It's interesting because now even though psychedelics are illegal, there is a kind of room, certain kind of university environments where people go through a tripping phase or whatever.
And there's sort of a little culture around that.
And Even when people are just doing it hedonistically, they still often open themselves to all sorts of channels of information and ideas that maybe they have to spend the rest of their lives trying to then suppress.
Yeah, I mean, and you could also make the argument that however it's come down, it's you know, we have to see it as kind of, I mean, there are positive aspects too.
You know, and it does seem like in the 60s and early 70s, you know, the culture wasn't ready for the kind of psychedelic evolution or revolution.
And it was kind of shaking things loose, and the energy got really, really dark, you know, kind of symbolized by Charles Manson and the Rolling Stones, Ultimate Concert and stuff.
And what I learned when I did Breaking Open the Head was that in the intervening 30 years, there's been an amazing kind of underground investigation, and a lot more knowledge has been pulled together.
And those people who continued in the field have gone really, really deep and uncovered amazing amounts of information and material.
And they provide you with access to extraordinary vibrational fields of consciousness that I don't think years of meditation is going to take you where DMT takes you in five minutes.
And the first thing that happens is that the whole area around you kind of fills with geometric patterns and runes and kind of strange symbols of some sort.
And I mean, and the first thing that one feels when one kind of arrives at this other realm or whatever it is is that it's incredibly different.
And the best that I could do to describe it, and I actually, I mean, I have actually seen elves a few times, but usually on DMT, I haven't seen elves.
It's more like some kind of like thousand-eyed, chattering, sort of hyper-organic entities who are in this kind of strange, vaulted, kind of plastic-feeling space.
Daniel, how in the world, how in the world can people taking this drug have such a similar experience unless they actually are in a place that really is?
In other words, you would expect a drug would have very different effects on different people firing off in a different way, but for them to have a common experience as you're describing would seem to suggest that it's real, that whatever it is you're transforming and to be able to understand and see around you really is in existence.
Yeah, I mean, I definitely felt that it was at least as real as this reality.
If you look at superstring theory and the Brian Green book and so on, I mean, quantum physics kind of opens up the possibility that there are these other dimensions or 11 dimensions of space-time.
That's right.
But of course, physics doesn't want to project the possibility that we could actually be connected to those other dimensions or have kind of direct experiences of them.
Yeah, I mean, one thing I'm trying to do in the new book is try to like just, you know, if you think about all these different substances and these kind of different realities they introduce you to, these different kind of domains or dimensions, it sort of gives you a different idea of what consciousness is.
And, you know, I sort of keep thinking of it now as being a kind of vibration or a frequency or something.
And these different chemicals, you know, it may actually be that they sort of change the vibrational rate of synapses firing or they.
The other thing I want to say is that when I started to come out of the DMT trip, I looked down at my arm and there was like my arm was covered with this kind of science fiction jeweled city.
And then I looked around at the other people in the room.
And all of them were sort of, it was like they'd become the kind of cosmic cartoon superheroes or their greatest fantasies.
They all had these kind of armatures around them and kind of suits of multicolored kind of prismatic.
And it was just such a strange thing.
It was like, you know, I was just baffled, basically, because it just didn't seem possible that a drug could create this effect.
It wasn't like all over everything.
It was like each person individually was in this kind of their own separate kind of superhero or kind of cosmic deity armature.
If all those, or even the great majority of those using this DMT, and I've certainly never used it, but if they actually experience roughly the same thing, generally the same alternate reality, then if that's really true, that would suggest that that alternate reality is real.
How could it suggest Anything else.
How could there be such a uniform chemical effect on any brain that would take it to the same place?
Couldn't be.
So that means there has really got to be something to it when you think about it.
really is something.
The End Professor Michio Kaku, who I'm honored to interview frequently, talks all the time about 11 dimensions, all the time about 11 dimensions, beginning to be pretty, I don't want to say generic because it's still exotic,
but I mean, you know, talked about right across the scientific community.
And so are you suggesting, Daniel, that DMT may be a legitimate ticket to a glimpse of one of those dimensions?
But what I really see as happening is kind of like mysticism or what's traditionally been thought of as mysticism or esoteric traditions and contemporary science beginning to reach the point where they can look at each other and see that they're basically saying the same thing.
Yeah, I mean, this has been something that's been happening over time, you know, since the 60s also, I suppose, like the Tao of physics and so on.
But science, even though quantum physics sort of states that the mind is central to the whole process of investigation, we haven't fully kind of integrated that idea into our way of looking at the world because it's kind of a big shift.
But if you want to actually work with psychedelics, I almost think of them more as like medicines in a way now, sort of psychic medicines or something.
But there are better substances to work with.
So I've received messages on Iboga, also known as ibogaine, which is an African psychedelic.
And I've received a lot of messages on ayahuasca, which is a South American potion.
And what I really feel is like it's really kind of like, I mean, our sort of computer metaphors help us here because it's almost like ayahuasca and ibogaine or iboga are kind of like interfaces over the DMT face-base, whatever it is.
Well, it's kind of like over if the DMT realm is some kind of like cosmic machine language or some kind of operating system that we're not really ready quite yet to access.
Ayahuasca and Ibogaine are kind of like Macintosh Windows or something.
They slow things down and they allow you to have real communication and to pull in messages that can really help your own evolution and understanding.
I don't know if Apple should be happy or unhappy with what you just said.
I'm sure they didn't like the slowdown part, but you're suggesting that these other drugs allow you a glimpse of what compared to the DMT experience that you did explain.
I think they allow you to interact with the kind of cosmic intelligences that are manifest during the DMT experience, but are kind of just it's too much.
Our little brains are not ready for it yet.
In fact, the last time I took it, I've only taken ibogaine twice.
I took it once in West Africa.
I went through a tribal initiation for breaking open the head, and I took it in a ritual there.
But then I also took it again in Mexico.
Ibogaine is very interesting because it's actually being used very successfully recently for treating heroin and other addictions.
Well, if it did things this good, if it took somebody off heroin or alcohol, which is, well, I don't want to say equally as bad, but as awful, that would be a pro-society kind of drug.
I mean, if it really did that, then you would think, why, the government might even encourage that, encourage the use.
Probably if you went to the website for MAPS, which is the multidisciplinary approach to psychedelic studies, which is maps.org, and did a search for Eboga or Ibogaine, stuff would pop up.
There's a lot of information about Ibogaine on the Internet.
The Journal of American Medical Association did an article last year looking at it and taking it very seriously.
And I have a number of friends who have been cured from heroin addiction from ibogaine, taking it once or several times.
I mean, when you consider the, you know, I mean, basically what we have in our society now is a kind of incredibly unlicensed experiment of chemicals gone haywire.
You know, and I don't see why anybody shouldn't be allowed to self-determine the chemicals they're going to use at this point, considering what we're being subjected to.
You know, I never signed up for various pesticides or all these different kinds of things that we're just being bombarded with constantly.
So why shouldn't I be allowed to self-determine substances that I would like to take?
But I do also think it's good to respect the laws of the country that you're in.
I mean, there doesn't seem there is psychological danger, definitely.
And yeah, there definitely are dangers.
Some of the dangers are dangers that we don't actually have kind of categories for.
I mean, if you read my book, I had an experience with a substance called DPT, dipropyltryptamine, which is a kind of analog of DMT.
And after that experience, I was in a kind of weird kind of occult waking dream state for a while.
And I had all these kind of crazy synchronicities happen.
And I had this kind of what basically it felt like, you know, and up to doing that experience, I'd never really thought much about the Western occult tradition and had never really paid much attention to Aleister Crowley and people like that.
But I had the sense of this kind of entity who was appearing in my dreams.
And then poltergeist phenomena started in the house, like, you know, mirrors started falling off the walls.
And I actually had to call on a friend to do an exorcism to kind of reintegrate the energy that had been released.
I mean, what I've more and more come to see as I've explored this stuff more and thought about it is that there's a reason why these shamanic cultures developed as they did to have kind of rituals around these substances.
And for these indigenous cultures, a lot of them, these substances are really the sacred essence of their cultures.
I mean, it was very important just for my development.
I mean, from that experience, I was able to kind of understand that there's a kind of, you know, some level of truth to the Western occult tradition.
And I got very fascinated with the ideas of Rudolf Steiner, who was an Austrian visionary who wrote in the early part of the 20th century, started a whole movement called Anthroposophy.
And he was trying to institute a kind of spiritual science, which would be a sort of systematic way that people could enter into these kind of other domains of consciousness through meditation techniques and developing waking clarity during the dream states and stuff.
And a lot of the experiences I had, I found that he gave me a real context for understanding.
Actually, the person who did the exorcism was a friend of mine who's sort of has skill as a witch.
And I'd actually taken the substance with her originally.
And I went away from my house for a week, and then I came back, and we both kind of, you know, I mean, I re-entered the space, and I could feel that the energy was just completely crazy in the space.
And I brought her back, and we both could feel this kind of, really felt like this kind of occult energy was just crackling in the rooms.
And luckily she had some kind of skills for dealing with this stuff.
it involved obsidian.
It's a very good substance.
Obsidian, black obsidian, is known to absorb negative occult energies.
I mean, basically for me, it was also a big lesson in, you know, I mean, what Carl Jung talks about, the, you know, the reality of the psyche and the kind of shadow and how, you know, how you have to work with the shadow.
And it could actually be projected and take kind of psychophysical manifestations.
But didn't this experience with DPT put on the big caution light for you in terms of what I mean, you're dabbling in areas that you don't know about, and obviously you just dabbled in one that bit you in the behind a little bit.
But I also, I mean, my feeling through this whole investigation that I did for the book was that, you know, I mean, to a certain extent, once I understood the seriousness of it and began to have these, you know, kind of shamanic experiences, I felt that it was absolutely necessary that somebody like me go to the limit and try to interpret these domains for the modern consciousness.
Yes, I have been concerned not only for my life, but the lives of people around me.
Because if you look at shamanism, I mean, you know, Eliada, in his book on shamanism, talks about how when somebody goes through their own kind of shamanic initiation process, which is basically what I think happened to me, the energy can be sort of uncontained and can sort of bounce around and affect people around them.
This is kind of recognized in shamanic societies.
And, you know, my father did die while I was writing the book.
This, of course, is a little more than vaguely Peruvian.
It's Cusco you're listening to and of things Peruvian.
I thought I'd mention my very good friend, and you'll remember her from years ago on this program, Bonnie Crystal, in search of the deepest holes in the ground in the earth.
She's in Peru right now.
I'm going to have her on for at least an hour about August 1st.
She's in Peru with thousands and thousands of feet of rope and an entire crew, and they're attempting to go further into the earth than anybody's ever gone.
That's what she does.
So she's in Peru at the moment.
I've got a schedule to try and meet her on the air and talk with her on ham radio.
But she's down at the base camp now at a high altitude where they have found some caves they're going to explore.
And Bonnie will indeed be on the program by satellite or however we're going to get her on about or on August 1st.
You don't frequently get guests who write on a subject as Daniel has written on this subject.
By the way, I should promote his book for him.
It's Breaking Open the Head.
Now, there's a title for you.
Breaking Open the Head.
You can get it at Amazon.com and so forth.
And we are talking about psychedelic drugs.
And Daniel was telling us about DPT.
And he said he admits that it opened some kind of door.
That's just an expression.
But he had to have an exorcism.
And he actually, well, it sounded like you were worried that some of that negative energy that was, I guess, surrounding you, could that have had anything to do with your father's death?
Well, it's heavy duty, but I mean, you know, what I, you know, and, you know, perhaps, you know, I mean, how can I say this?
I mean, what came, what I've kind of ascertained from doing this book and then working on this book about prophecies is that in some sense, you know, I feel that I am a kind of messenger who's trying to bring in this kind of information that the culture is very resistant and reluctant to deal with.
Of course, people can think that, but you really have to go deeper than that because you have to think about what all this material says.
And I can tell you equally powerful stories about healings that have taken place through the Native American Church, through using Peyote, through ayahuasca.
I've heard many stories from people of their incredible healings from cancers and all sorts of ailments.
Well, yeah, and the more you're rooted in a tradition and are kind of pushing the energy up.
And I think that part of my problem was as a kind of New York nihilistic kid, the background I was coming out of, I was a little bit attracted to the dark side.
And that attraction kind of pulled me in.
And even that, I don't think, is all bad, because the dark side is part of us.
And there's something ridiculous about the New Age spirituality, which is always kind of insisting on this kind of bliss-bunny light.
We actually have to do, I mean, when you realize that this stuff is for real, we have incredibly hard work to do to kind of integrate the dark and the light and to recognize the shadow.
I think it's becoming more and more clear that I think Carl Jung is underestimated and he's incredibly important and valuable.
But his whole idea that as psychic beings, we have the shadow, this sort of dark matter.
And if we don't deal with it, if we don't integrate it, if we don't look at it, we project it.
And if I look at what's happening in our world right now, what basically seems to be the case is that people don't want to deal with the dark matter of the psyche.
They don't want to deal with the shadow, so we're just projecting it further and further.
And when I look at the war on Iraq, what I basically see are people like Bush and Cheney who don't want to take any sort of personal responsibility for their own psyche.
They're simply projecting the shadow deeper and deeper into material reality to the point where we threaten the destruction of the whole planet in terms of using radiation, depleted uranium, attitude that you're expressing right now is clearly why it's against the law.
If you become anti-war, anti-administration, anti-anti, then that's why it's illegal, and there's no amount of cajoling or good deeds that you can cite from it that's going to get it made legal if it does this.
And I think that the turnover is going to require a kind of reckoning with the psyche and with the dark matter of the psyche that has to be on an individual level to prevent basically global death.
Well, I mean, I think it's clear that if you, I mean, basically, what happened to me was during this book, Breaking Up in the Head, I went down to the Amazon.
And, you know, I had never been to the Amazon before, and it's an incredibly amazing experience to go to the jungle for the first time.
I mean, you definitely feel this kind of creative force and fecundity of nature, and this kind of PlayStation for nature to express itself.
We passed through these huge sections of the Amazon that the people who'd been there a lot said that 10, 15 years ago were incredibly lush jungle, and they were now basically scrubland.
And section by section, several million acres of a time, the Amazon is hacked down.
Well, basically, first the oil company goes in, finds oil, builds a road, then the kind of poor mestizos start burning out for farms, timber companies move in and take out the logs, and after a few years you have, from the kind of living lungs of the planet, you have just sort of scrubland that can barely support anything.
The astronauts, Daniel, from space say the one sure thing they always see from space, without question, are all the fires in Brazil and in South America and all the burning of forests that's being done.
But the point that I wanted to make is just that each big discovery for the oil companies, this huge inroad and then this destruction, usually destroys one or two Indian tribes who've been sort of holding on, leads to enough oil to support the U.S. kind of demand for oil for something in the area of like three to five days.
So when I understood this fully and I came back and I started reading about the ecological situation, I realized that the unsupportable nature of our society is beyond what most people are capable of reckoning with.
To be fair, Daniel, it's not just the oil companies.
Listen, the government will build a road, for example, in Brazil through the rainforest, and then farmers will come along, and they'll burn down part of the rainforest and plant it, and it's good for two or three years, and then the soil is no longer any good, so they've got to burn down more of it and more of it.
So it's not just the oil companies that are contributing to the destruction of the rainforest.
I mean, as we know, a year ago, there were all these articles about how the oceans are 90% fished out, and entire oceanic food chains have disappeared.
But when I walk around New York, I don't notice people consuming less marine life.
people are sitting at restaurants eating gigantic swordfish and tuna and everything else.
So we seem to be, you know, so basically what I came to understand when I put these two things together, on the one hand, there's this kind of shamanic and occult and psychic reality which our society has completely negated and suppressed, but actually is completely real.
And then there's this kind of materialist destruction of the planet taking place, that these had to be reconciled.
And what I really began to understand is that the kind of material destruction of the biosphere is a willed cataclysm, which is carefully designed to force an evolution of human consciousness to a different level.
And what I'm presenting in the next book is ultimately, I think, that once we get through the transition, we'll enter an incredibly harmonious and harmonic period.
I mean, I can see the endpoint, the kind of turnaround, and I can see where we are now.
But I think that a lot is up to the individuals to kind of activate their will.
It's like I was talking to this New Age woman writer, channeler, and she was saying, oh, the prophecy says that there's going to be the rainbow nation, we're all going to walk in harmony.
And I was like, it's all well and good to say that.
But if you're not actually doing something towards that, I think that that's a problem.
And even with Terence McKenna, much as I totally adore his writing, I think that he's a genius, there was a sense that, oh, it's just going to happen.
This 2012 escaton, Creason's point is just going to happen.
We don't really have to do anything.
It's kind of a passive situation.
And I think it's quite the opposite.
I think that we're actually already in the prophecy.
We're in the transition to the new structure, but it requires individuals willing and doing and awakening to.
Well, I think that what's happening right now, and this is partially personal, partially anecdotal, observational, talking to a lot and a lot of people.
And also, I've been studying the crop circles in England.
And I think that's one indication on the level.
That basically material reality is becoming subtly less physically dense and subtly more psychically responsive.
And that people are experiencing this over time through increases in synchronizations.
You sort of think about somebody, they call you up, you have a dream about something, it happens.
As one of my friends who's studying the Crop Circle said, it's kind of like the karmic rubber band is snapping back faster and faster.
People seem to be getting rewarded and punished.
It's like there's this kind of sense of incredible psychic acceleration taking place.
And it's something that I've just experienced every day in my own life, so I know that it's the case.
And that's the way I look at it.
It's a change in the kind of vibrational frequency of the planet.
And are you suggesting that the occurrence of this evolutionary event, the change of, I don't know, all these mindsets, impossible as it seems, is sort of an event that's in a race with otherwise what's going to be the end of everything?
Yeah, I mean, psychedelics are incredible tools and kind of technology for understanding the psyche and for exploring these other dimensions of reality.
And, you know, they probably will be the beginning of a kind of new science, a new way of exploring paradox and possibility that we just haven't been ready psychically to handle up to this point.
Yes, but if the end result of the use of some of these is to put one in the psychological mindset that you're in right now, I mean, you began to explain your worldview and so forth, then the chances of that ever becoming legal and hence widespread are almost slim and none.
Well, you're under the assumption that this civilization is going to continue in its present form.
And anyway, that legality is really the key issue here.
I mean, what is happening is happening.
and whether, you know, the kind of government establishment of a certain country wants to do something or not, it can't prevent what is, you know, meant to happen and in some sense already has happened.
I mean, one thing that this is complicated, and it's something I'm trying to really explore in the new book, which is that what we're experiencing is a kind of phase shift of consciousness.
And the consciousness we're in right now, which is kind of mental, rational consciousness, is obsessed with masses and statistics and abstract quantities.
So, you know, we're always concerned about mass this and cataclysms and so on.
The consciousness structure that we're moving into is kind of the opposite.
It's much more about kind of subtle distinctions, qualities, attunements, synchronicities, and deeper levels of being.
So, you know, I certainly hope that there will be a mass awakening, and I certainly work for that, you know, whenever I speak or whatever I write.
But, you know, it may happen in a different way.
You know, it may not be like the 60s where suddenly, you know, 50 million kids turn on to a whole new culture.
It may be something that happens in a different way.
It's basically all you can do, because we don't have any real science on psychedelics because there's so much hysteria around the subject, negativity, that all that the individual can do, if they're interested in this area, is to do the best they can to gather information.
I mean, it is unclear with people who've ended up in wards whether or not what happened with the chemical psychedelics were due to the psychedelics, were due to the psychedelics kind of activating some pre-existing schizophrenic or psychotic condition.
So there are definitely dangers here.
However, before the culture turned kind of negative against LSD, for instance in the 60s, it was considered an astonishingly safe drug, a wonder drug, in the 50s and early 60s.
They'd done thousands and thousands of studies with it and had not had any serious problems.
I went through the 60s like everybody else, and what I remember is people who were unstable and leaning toward the psychotic, who used marijuana, very light compared to what else we're talking about here, would definitely get into a more psychotic state of mind using marijuana.
So I assume it's a similar thing you're describing to me here, and you're suggesting that if you end up in a psych ward someplace, that there was something in your brain that would have had you there eventually anyway, or you tended toward that direction or what?
I have to go with my own subjective experience, which is that for me and for some of the people that I know, these explorations have been very, very valuable and have been worth the risks that we've had to take.
And there are also a lot of substances where we know there are almost no risks, including mushrooms and peyote, the natural ones, ayahuasca, where there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of years of relationship between human nervous systems and these plant compounds.
So clearly, those would be, if it was possible, good places to start.
And especially if it's conducted with somebody who's knowledgeable, who's a shaman, who's been trained in some way.
I mean, the music is very important.
I mean, basically, my understanding is that in indigenous tribal societies, the rates of mental illness are much, much lower than they are in modern industrial societies.
Do you think that a native shaman would speak sufficiently to a person that he's about to introduce to a trip of this sort, and that a traditional shaman would look for those signs, those negative signs that would indicate a potential bad or disastrous trip and stop it and not proceed?
You know, it's possible, but I feel like this whole area of inquiry, for me, there's an element here which is like all we can do in this area, and I think it's positive in a strange way, is because we don't really know that much, the science has been rigged and there's so much hysteria about it.
It's an area where the individual has to decide for themselves and completely take responsibility for their own activity.
I don't counsel people to take psychedelics.
I don't think that's correct.
It's completely up to the individual.
And we have a society where people really want to have experts.
They don't want to take responsibility.
They want to have somebody to blame.
Well, this is an area where all you can do is get the best material you can.
You can read books like mine, Andrew Wiles.
You can study the Arrowid website and see what the reports say.
I mean, does anybody have any studies showing I have no clue, and I think that the number has been wildly correct.
But I just keep insisting on it, and I have a lot of friends who are psychonauts and trippers.
And what sort of bums me out about the way they handle this stuff is that they don't go out of their way to try the indigenous shamanic traditional methods, which create a totally different context for these substances and give you an incredibly different sense of their meaning and possibility.
And in November, I actually have an article out in Black Book magazine.
In November, I went down to Brazil and I went deep into the Amazon on a rickety boat that took like four days to get there, where we went to the center of this religion called Santo Daime, which uses ayahuasca as its sacrament and kind of mixes Christian and indigenous elements.
And it was an amazing experience.
These ceremonies were incredibly visionary.
The music was incredibly beautiful.
It was the most profound connection to kind of sacredness that I'd ever experienced.
But on the one hand, Daniel, earlier you told me that no matter what, pretty much, people are going to have the same life-altering experience, for example, with DMT.
But on the other hand, you seem to be sort of looking down your nose a little bit at those who don't participate in the traditional aspect of it, but just pop it and have the experience.
I mean, I think that the more guided tours kind of, you know, I mean, what happens with a lot of people is they have one or two very violent and volatile psychedelic experiences and then close the door on the whole subject because it's just something they don't want to deal with ever again.
You know, whereas if we integrated, you know, the subject better into our culture, or if people go and had experiences in these other traditions, it would be a much easier landing and a much safer ride.
And the healing and the positive aspects might predominate over the kind of psychic bungee cord jumping aspect, which I think is pretty trivial.
So this tradition, the Santa Daime, you drink ayahuasca.
They have a kind of round church-like structure.
Everybody wears white.
They separate the men and the women.
And it's very much like a church.
And you either stand or sit or dance all night long.
Sometimes you do this little dance step back and forth for like 12 or 15 hours or something while you drink ayahuasca.
And you sing.
And it's pretty intense.
And at first I had a very negative reaction to it.
And it was just so church-like, I couldn't believe it.
I was kind of running out of the ceremonies.
And finally, we went down towards the Amazon, and we stopped at this village, and we did the ceremony.
And people were dancing all night.
My friends were dancing.
And I ran out and I went back to my hammock.
And the ayahuasca was very, very strong.
So I lay down in my hammock, and finally, for the first time, or maybe I'd seen them before, but anyway, I saw the Terrence McKenna's machine elves.
They came leaping over to me in my closed-eye vision, and they were showing me these kind of things in their hands and pointing in all directions and being all kind of hectic and crazy.
Anyway, so I was sort of with that for a little bit, and then I was like, you know, I'm bored of these elves.
It just seemed more distraction.
And it seemed more like something that was just being generated at a certain level of the mind.
And so I went back to the ceremony, and I actually just invested in the dancing and the singing and spent the rest of the night there.
And I realized that when you fully got into the ceremony, that the whole point of doing it is to kind of raise the group vibration and to focus positive energy.
And it was the most amazing experience, devotional experience, that I'd ever had in my life.
And I was not somebody who had ever been very interested in kind of devotion as a spiritual practice.
I understood that my friend who was there described doing these ceremonies as kind of like a spiritual washing machine or something.
That it becomes this way to clear out your psyche of negative stuff and garbage.
Your energy is focused upwards, and when kind of negative thoughts come up, disturbing thoughts, you kind of just learn to let them go and stay in what they call the current.
So it's almost like psychic yoga or something.
It's a kind of mental training, or it's like a kind of vipassana meditation training, where you're learning how to, using the technology of these substances and these ceremonies to retrain your mind in a more positive way.
I think that I sound pretty sensible when I talk about it.
I haven't gotten an excessive amount of criticism.
I mean, I would say that my problem has been more that, I mean, it's interesting to be in New York City and to be part of the kind of mainstream media world here and to be trying to move these ideas more into the mainstream of the culture.
And that's definitely a huge struggle.
And basically what you get is kind of incomprehension and people just not wanting to think about these areas.
But they see it on such a literal kind of atavistic level that to me it's kind of pathetic, you know.
But, you know, that's why you really need to go into kind of, you know, like the Jungian perspective, which sees the apocalypse essentially as a psychic event.
One of Jung's disciples, Edniger, describes it as the momentous moment of the coming to self-realization of human consciousness.
you are so the differences you describe are I don't know how meaningful they are I mean if you really agree well I don't think as in the Left Behind series Christ is going to come on a white horse and kill millions of Islamic people or whatever.
I mean, I think it's a little bit more subtle than that.
I mean, I think it's more like that Christ was a real avatar and that he came at a certain point to bring a kind of higher vibrational level of consciousness to humanity.
And because it was so higher, it kind of shook everything down to its core.
And we're moving to the point where we're going to have to be able to integrate that level and simulate it.
Daniel Pinchbeck is my guest, and if he writes the way he talks, then it's going to be a very honest assessment, a very honest assessment of the world of psychedelics as he knows them.
Because he's really given us that.
The positive from his point of view, and certainly the negative as well.
Fascinating stuff.
And we're about to go to the phones.
I have just a couple of more questions, then it's off to all of you.
Well, from the Mayan perspective, it means that they were basically if you look at the Mayan and Toltic civilizations for about 1,000 years, they were obsessed with trying to establish this particular date, which I think, there's a really good book called Mayo Cosmogenesis 2012, where it's established December 21st, 2012, and it's kind of imprinted in a lot of their sculptures and stonework.
And at that point, the Earth and the Sun come into direct alignment with the center of the Milky Way, which the Mayans knew as the cosmic mother.
And they also called it a black hole, interestingly enough, because it turns out that there is a huge black hole, the center of the Milky Way that was only discovered recently by astronomers.
So it's pretty interesting that the Mayans had this idea over 1,000 years ago.
And basically, it's kind of like a vibrational step up or reintegration point, a kind of reconnection with the cosmic center, with the kind of intelligent force, guiding force behind the whole situation we're in.
I mean, I think what we're going to learn is like we've, you know, if you look at modern development the last couple thousand years in a way, we kind of had to wrench ourselves away from nature and from the cosmos and become, you know, and have this kind of separate understanding ourselves as individual egos.
You know, but if you look at Stonehenge and Chaco Canyon and the way that indigenous and traditional cultures think and the pyramids, they were completely aware that human consciousness was integrated with kind of cosmic cycles and kind of galactic cycles, and that there were these kind of continual streams of information waves flowing from the sun and from other parts of the galaxy.
And I think that's an understanding that we're kind of on the verge of reaccessing.
Well, yeah, I mean, because that's going to lead me into a long discourse.
But I mean, I started studying the crop circles, and then some of the crop circles particularly referenced the graze.
And then I had to sort of think about it.
Well, there was particularly, there was one in summer of 2001, which was a mirror image of something that Carl Sagan had sent into space in the early 70s.
They had a slightly different planetary configuration.
Where we had a little human, there was a little smaller alien figure with a big head.
Yep.
So I had never thought of the gray alien abduction stuff as anything more than kooky, new age trash.
But I decided that I had to begin to think about it seriously.
And so I started reading all of these accounts and reading the books about them and stuff.
And then I began to have some kind of weird dream experiences that I felt like I was kind of pulling the energy of the whole gray thing towards me.
And what I began to, as I went deeper and deeper into thinking about it, I think there's almost no real evidence that they're extraterrestrial.
I think there's more sense that they're kind of infraterrestrial and kind of goblin-like or demonic.
And I think they're connected to these kind of prophecies.
I mean, the Aztecs talked about, I think they're called the Zitzilimente, these kind of sky demons who are supposed to descend at the transition from the fifth sun to the sixth sun, which would be this 2012 kind of transition.
And what seems to be it's hard to explain these things because you have to sort of go beyond dualities in a way.
In a sense, they're a psychic projection.
They're a kind of shadow projection of where we're at psychically.
We've kind of created this model of these entities that are obsessed with technology and genetic reproduction and super advanced technological species, which kind of fits all of our kind of notions based on our kind of material technological state of consciousness and state of being.
But actually, I think that, I mean, I'm much more interested in the idea that José Arguelos puts forth that the future will be actually post-technological, that technology is a kind of bridging mechanism to get us from one state of consciousness to another.
And I think that actually these entities are almost like kind of cosmic bacteria.
And they are functioning on the level of consciousness very much like a different kind of virus or a bacteria that are going to break down levels of densified consciousness that aren't ready for this transitional shift.
Now I'm going to jump, and then we're going to go to the phones, but I can't resist this question because it'll answer so much for so many people, I suppose.
DMT, once you got past the terrifying stage and you got to the joyful, incredible, hard to describe with any words stage.
I mean, it was the kind of sense of complete conviction in these alternative realities that I did feel this kind of completion of a certain level of my understanding, That this otherness did completely exist in its own realm,
and that I felt a lot of gratitude, actually, because I felt that the beings in that other reality are sort of much more advanced than we are and are kind of guiding us along.
And I had a comment that the experience that your guest was talking about, about synchronicity and psychic events after experiences with hallucinogenics, I have had those exact experiences a few times.
Oh, no, I mean, for me, that's just become very commonplace.
I mean, many, many people I've spoken to, people talk about one phrase I heard which I really liked was the synchronicity drop.
You know, that for a while it's like your kind of psychic voltage meter.
It's amped up, and these things are kind of, you know, things start flowing, synchronicities happen, and then you get a little too self-confident or ego involved in the whole thing, and the whole thing kind of collapses on you.
unidentified
Exactly.
And I had another question.
I'm from the south, obviously, and down here, method of choice is usually hallucinated mushrooms.
I was wondering, as far as research is concerned, where could I look for to find information about the original uses of that down here in this area?
You know, you probably want to just go and talk to, you know, if there are any local indigenous people around, go and talk to them.
I mean, I think actually that's something that I really feel is going to be important in this transition period is that people with really good intentions and kind of non-patronizing intentions and attitudes kind of go and re-contact the Indigenous people of America who are really holding a lot of knowledge and wisdom.
And I think would answer your question if you found the right people and approached them in the right frame of mind.
I think it's important, and I think that it's useful.
I've also talked to people, especially in the Northwest, in the Northwest you have the phenomenon of a lot of kind of hippie parents moved out there in the 60s and kind of semi-commune situations.
Now you have a second, or almost like a second and a half generation, of kids who've been grown up with the psychedelic experience.
And in some cases, I think that they're kind of naturally rediscovering traditional ways, even without any contact with indigenous people.
They're kind of becoming more ceremonial about the way they're thinking about using these substances.
I'd like to offer my overall anecdotal view of DMT.
I've done it several times.
I've done the combination orally, smoked it.
The grays, they're there, man.
You know what?
I know what it feels like to be a lab rat, you know, to have that gloved hand reaching down in the little glass aquarium examining you.
Not pretty.
I don't have a good view of those guys anymore.
It used to be kind of a funny thing.
But the point I'd like to make is the government knows all about this stuff.
Freedom of Information Act has disclosed back in the 50s, Albert Hoffman, the man who is credited with bringing LSD to the planet Earth, awakening millions, was a victim or, well, he's almost victimized, but he was smart enough to find it off.
But the CIA sent over a pseudoscientist after the rediscovery of the mushrooms by Gordon Wasson through Harvard, and they were looking for the active ingredient of mushrooms.
And they finally isolated it.
It was porphosloxy-dimethyltryptamine.
And, you know, eventually it was just a moot subject because a few years later, dimethyltryptamine in the double N form was synthesized by, I believe, a guy named Sausa.
And the CIAs had their hands on it since the 50s.
I mean, you know, that's when this whole alien thing really got rolling, you know?
You're saying that our government is dispensing these drugs to who well that's a known I mean that's well known that um this this substance I think is called Provigil.
But I mean you know I think that the government you know if you want to get into the kind of paranoid spooky stuff they're probably very interested in well you know I don't really like to go in that area so much anymore.
But anyway they're very interested in different behavior modification substances.
But psychedelics, my guess is they've kind of closed the book on.
They're just not that interested because you can't really control anybody's behavior with psychedelics.
Well, I mean, ketamine has become very, very popular.
And as psychedelics go, I mean, it's an animal tranquilizer, originally, an anesthetic.
And it's a very interesting, visionary substance.
But it unfortunately seems to be, can become psychologically addictive.
And it seems to have a kind of a group of kind of entities attached to it who really like to get humans kind of into their reality and give them this sense, kind of inflated sense of enormous kind of power and potential.
At the same time, it may be that these entities are not really beneficial for us, and it's more kind of like a parasitic situation.
That would be some of my main thoughts about ketamine.
I consider it's a substance that seems to leave people vulnerable and kind of spiritually weak.
And in that way, I see it as kind of the opposite to ayahuasca, which when it's used properly, I think helps people to really go deeper into themselves and become spiritually stronger.
And I don't know, a friend of mine told me about it.
I first did it in downtown New York.
And I wrote about this in Breaking Open the Head.
I did this sort of new age ceremony where we all had to wear adult-depends diapers and keep a vomit bucket near us in case the stuff came out direction.
From what I've noticed from my hallucinogen drug uses is that out of all of them, the peyote was, I would say, probably the most powerful.
And the best way I would describe peyote is probably like the first couple seconds of waking up from a dream state.
And I found that I've been able to create that type of consciousness through a presence.
And I was wondering if you or anybody out there had experienced anything like a drug state or a hallucinogen-induced state just without using drugs through methods of just trying to become present.
I mean, for a while, I got very interested in practicing Tibetan dream yoga, and my dreams began to go just wild and expand.
And then I started having lucid dreaming and sort of different hypnagogic visions.
It seems like once you kind of open, you know, break open the head, open the doorway, you become more attuned to these other frequencies or other levels of vibration.
I'd like to ask everybody listening to your show right now to just close their eyes and just pause for one second and just ask themselves what in this moment is lacking?
And that is a question that then masters have asked their students for thousands of years to get themselves to just come into the moment and think.
So if everybody could do that, that would be excellent.
But I mean, I think that you're making a good point, too, which is that, you know, and once again, it's like trying to become more present and more in the here and now is something that these psychedelic states really, really bring on in a way.
And it's something that our society kind of suppresses.
If you think about the way people live in our society, they're sort of always frantic and worried about the future or kind of anxious and depressed about the past.
So they tend not to kind of really settle into the present moment.
And if you read kind of Buddhism or Zen or Dzogchen teachings, it's really about becoming more and more comfortable and more and more calm in the kind of lucidity or the luminosity of the present moment.
That's definitely something that I feel that my own psychedelic experiences have helped me to understand.
But, you know, I find it strange, and I'm glad that you're doing what you do here tonight and getting the message out to people because I find it strange that George's show doesn't have as much of this going on.
I hope, Art, that maybe you can get with them to do that.
I have close to 100 speakers that like Sasha Shogun.
I'm sure George will get intrigued and explore this area.
It's one of life's mysteries.
So, sure.
unidentified
Yeah, I would love it, Art, if you can.
I'll get in touch with you.
I'll talk to Lex or something.
Daniel, question and comment.
About what we have is in this country, the legislation, everything scheduled as including marijuana as a Schedule I substance, which is ridiculous, in my opinion, with medical marijuana's abilities to be able to cure certain diseases.
I just find it really hard to deal with when it comes to the way that they're treating the churches, the religious implications of this.
We do have some moves going on now, and Utah just recently, from what I understand, proved that non-white or white people can actually get the same privileges as the Native American church, the Peo Church of God for the Church.
Well, there is a case which the head of the Unite de Vegetalas has taken, and he's won in the federal court, which would protect sacramental use of ayahuasca for the Unite de Vegetalas, and maybe that would also transfer over to the Sente Daime.
Because these religions are officially sanctioned religions in Brazil.
They're also sanctioned in Europe and parts of Europe and Holland and so on.
So they have UN protection.
And, you know, under the Freedom of Religion Act and so on, it should be justifiable to have these practices here.
Right, which makes me even more, gives me an even deeper level of understanding of why there's not really much sense in eliciting that kind of stuff.
That, you know, I mean, reality itself is magic.
You know, we're living in, you know, I mean, the Buddhists, interestingly, called it Maya, the world of illusion.
Interestingly, that's the same name as the, you know, civilization of the classical Maya, who were very involved in magic and illusion.
I think that what we need to do at this point is, rather than kind of separating off of these kind of ceremonial magical situations, is to invest deeper in the magic that is real reality.
And, you know, the thing about salvia, salvia divinorum is an herb from the Mazatec Indians.
And it's a very strange and interesting plant.
It only grows in a handful of, they've only found it in a handful of shamanic gardens there.
It doesn't produce seeds, usually.
It's a cult gem.
Anyway, it's just everything about it is very magical and kind of wonderful.
And the experience that one has when one takes it is kind of like just a kind of orthogonal kind of experience of a different time and space, kind of coming at you from a different angle.
And also often a sense of a strong presence.
Often people describe it as a kind of feminine presence.
Some people who have more visual hallucinations than I did see kind of like female presences in a garden or in a forest.
It seems to be a substance that, you know, when people smoke it, you know, strong extractor, they often have very, like, once again, kind of freak out DMT style experiences, which is, once again, like nice as kind of...
psychic bungee cord jumping but it also seems there's the potential for real healing and beneficial experiences you know if we were to learn a little bit more about how the Mazatecs treated the plant or one could say held the medicine very interesting thank you yeah very interesting indeed this whole Thing is absolutely fascinating.
Right, but, you know, I think I'm saying it with a slightly different emphasis, that really it's the time to become calm and to become more attuned to your reality and to take your consciousness more seriously and to develop in that way, you know, rather than getting into paranoid states of, you know, this war and that war.
I don't think those are going to serve us very well.
I think it's about attaining a different level of consciousness.