Dennis McKenna recounts his brother Terence's failed Time Wave Zero prediction and their 1971 La Churrera expedition where they encountered the Witoto tribe. While debunking the 2012 singularity, they explore the "stoned ape theory" linking psilocybin to human evolution and critique modern pharmaceutical rigidity. The episode concludes by promoting a Peruvian conference to legalize coca for medical use and the Bionosis project digitizing 150,000 rainforest specimens to preserve ancestral botanical wisdom against cartels. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Wisdom of the Leaf Summit00:04:43
The McKenna Academy is hosting the Wisdom of the Leaf Coca Summit in 2025, from February 3rd through the 7th at the Wilkatica Retreat Center in the Sacred Valley of Peru, with dozens of biologists, doctors, and professionals coming together alongside Dennis McKenna.
And now you can join the summit too.
Just go to mckenna.academy to find more information on the Coca Summit.
And you can email annette at mckenna.academy for pricing and details.
Be a part of the change, and now enjoy this fantastic conversation with Dennis McKenna.
All right, Dennis.
Thanks for coming, man.
Thank you for having me.
Of course.
I'm very excited to chat with you.
It's a pleasure.
I've been looking forward to this ever since you contacted me.
So have I.
So have I. Your book is absolutely fascinating.
The way it just like walks people through you and your brother's childhood and growing up and essentially like how you guys were incubated into this world of psychedelics and You know, the whole like 60s counterculture movements.
And, you know, I thought it was really cool how it was a very grounded backstory of how you guys came to be and how you guys are also so different, but also so similar.
Yes, we were very similar.
Of course, my brother was four years older than I was.
And he was interested in all kinds of things.
And being the older sibling, He got all the attention, right?
And I was sort of in the background.
But he was such an interesting person.
I wanted to be involved in everything that he was doing, you know.
And I'm just the pesky little brother, you know, sort of tagging along.
But sometimes, you know, it synced.
And we had, you know, since you've read the book, and by the way, I should mention with the book, the copy I sent you is the original edition, 2012 edition.
There's a new edition available now.
The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss.
My Life with Terrence McKenna.
Yeah.
There's a new edition from Synergetic Press, and it came out a couple years ago, and it's exactly the same as the old edition, except there's a 50-page addendum, which kind of updates it.
So if people want the new edition, they should buy it from Synergetic Press.
Okay.
You get one of the rare original copies.
There's only about 15 of these copies left in the world.
So.
This is probably worth something.
It was $35.
Maybe it's worth $50 now.
But anyway, it's a special gift to you.
Well, I'm very honored.
Thank you.
But the book was yeah, I wanted to tell my side of the story, basically, with the book and recount our whole lives.
You know, many people are familiar with Terrence's book, True Hallucinations, which was published about 1993.
And that really focuses on our trip to.
La Churera and that whole adventure that we had down in Colombia, which we're more or less famous for, in some ways more infamous for.
With this book, I wanted to tell a broader story about our lives, our childhoods, how we got interested in all this, and sort of what that ensued to, what was the sequelae of that.
And of course, as siblings, as siblings do, we squabbled.
Constantly, you know, when I was a kid.
And my brother was very creative in finding many ways to torture me.
You know, I mean, he was a master of psyops and all that.
And he was, you know, I mean, he didn't actually physically beat me.
He was more subtle than that, but he could scare the bejesus out of me.
And he did.
He was a fan of psychological torture.
Psychological torture.
And he took great pleasure in doing that, you know.
But eventually I became sort of immune to it.
And then I would sort of, you know, Push back and uh, you know, but I mean, we had this relationship which actually it became we became closer after he left home.
Psychological Torture in High School00:07:07
He left, yeah, to go to high school in California when he was a junior, and uh, so all of a sudden, I was effectively an only child.
This was early, this was like 1962.
Well, I had my own room, that was great.
But I was lonely and I was sort of, at that point, I began to realize what a true sort of soulmate he was, you know, how much I loved him, even though, you know, there was constant fighting.
But when he was away, I began to appreciate him and I began to really look forward to his visits back at Christmas and summer and so on.
And we discovered that we had these mutual interests.
And one of the main interests that sort of fascinated us as a continuing carrot was science fiction.
I mean, that was the thing.
We were serious science fiction nerds, you know.
And when psychedelics came along or began to come along in the 60s, you know, we were fascinated by this because we were both like nerds, you know, we were fascinated with weird shit, basically.
When psychedelics came along, we knew about it.
We were fascinated by it.
But a lot of people who became interested in psychedelics in that era were, they approached it from the standpoint of a traditional use or shamanism or therapeutic use or, you know, that sort of approach, you know, that it was a spiritual thing.
We were science fiction nuts.
We approached it as an engineering problem.
We thought, especially with DMT.
I mean, DMT quickly rose in our pantheon to being the ultimate psychedelic, you know.
And we thought, this stuff, this is not a drug.
This is a portal to another dimension.
That was the way that we thought of it.
And what was the first psychedelic that you guys came across?
Because psilocybin mushrooms weren't.
Easily to come across in the United States.
That was in the future.
Right.
So, was it just LSD mainly?
There was LSD, there was mescaline, and there was DMT.
There wasn't much DMT around, but it was there.
DMT is a very simple molecule, it's very easy to make.
There were underground chemists making DMT.
And when my brother was living in Berkeley and originally in Los Altos, where he was going to high school, he had.
He had actually one of his closest friends, one of his classmates, a fellow named Rick Watson, who was another super genius weirdo.
And Rick Watson was a chemist, and he was actually an amateur chemist, but he had some connections with the Stanford Research Institute.
And the Stanford Research Institute was working with DMT, as it turned out at that time.
So he.
Was able to get DMT, and through that connection, Terrence was able to access DMT.
What was Stanford doing with DMT?
Good question.
Nobody knows, you know, but a lot of the people at the Stanford Research Institute were interested in psychedelics.
Well, they were interested in psychedelics in many different ways.
For one thing, for solving problems, you know, for creativity, for enhancing creativity.
And you know, in the 60s, the whole government program with MKUltra and all that was all in full swing.
Right.
Nobody understood the hype.
This is the height of the Charles Manson stuff when he was going to that free clinic in Haight-Ashbury.
Exactly.
Jolly West.
Yeah, that's right.
And at the time, psychedelics were just this thing that, you know, the government felt that they needed to know about.
So there were secret ops programs at the Stanford Research Institute.
Right.
Yeah, the Cold War was such a crazy time.
And the fact that it collided with the psychedelic movement is just crazy.
Yeah, yeah.
One of Terrence's other good friends, a friend of this fellow, Rick Watson, the chemist, another good friend of his, was a guy named John Parker.
And he was another, you know, amazing person.
And he was the son of, A big mucky muck at the NASA Ames Research Center, which was in Mountain View, next to Palo Alto, next to Los Altos.
And John Parker Sr. was the head of chemical operations at NASA Ames Research.
So he was doing a lot of research on materials science.
He was looking into materials to make spacecraft out of that were fire resistant and all that.
But because he was A very, very peculiar person, shall we put it that way.
He had side interests, and side interests included psychedelics.
And John Parker became, for John Parker studied everything esoteric that he could get his hands on alchemy, chemistry, you know, esoteric traditions, all of these things.
He became a very good friend of Terence's.
And then he came back to Paonia, this little podunk.
Town that I was stuck in going to high school, but one summer John Parker came back with Terrence, you know, to Paonia and he took a liking to me for some reason.
He thought I was cool and I was totally in awe of this guy because he was so weird and yet so obviously brilliant and he knew so many things.
So he became a major mentor of mine, you know, and we entered into this correspondence that lasted years in which we.
He introduced me to all of these amazing ideas.
And it's really that was, I guess, a major influence in my sort of esoteric education, you know.
And of course, he knew a lot about drugs.
I mean, we all were wanting to learn about drugs.
Oral DMT and Little People00:03:30
So DMT was there, LSD was around.
And how did you take DMT back then?
We, the way that you, Usually, what you got was very impure DMT.
It was probably made in a bathtub somewhere by some crazy chemist.
It was anything but pure.
Didn't really matter because it's a free base.
You put a little bit of it in a pipe on top of an organic substrate, like maybe parsley leaves or something like that, or cannabis, and then you just smoked it in a pipe.
Three or four big hits.
It's very hard on the lungs, but we were smoking.
Cannabis, where our lungs were, you know, endured to that anyway.
That's how we did it, you know.
And when you do it that way, vaping is sometimes a lot more gentle than taking DMT by a pipe because it is so fast, it just comes at you like a freight train.
It's like, you know, this just the world dissolves in this world of hallucinations.
Apparently strange entities and all these things just open up.
But it's the same thing.
It's a 20 minute outside, very, very short experience.
And we were totally impressed with this.
I mean, who wouldn't be?
And we were fascinated.
We thought LSD is interesting, but DMT is the ultimate metaphysical reality pill, we thought.
Although it's not a pill, but Terrence used to call it that.
It's the ultimate metaphysical reality.
The problem we experienced with DMT was it was too darn short.
By the time you got into it, it was over.
By the time you got into it and sort of started looking around, you were already on the way down.
So we thought, well, maybe if we could find an orally active form of some kind, it would be more prolonged and we'd have more time to look into that dimension, which is what we thought of it as.
We thought of it as a place, not an experience, but an actual. place that our minds were teleported to or something like that.
We thought if we could find another form that was orally active, it would absorb most slowly and go away more slowly.
So that's what led us to look for an orally active form of DMT in South America.
This was all around 1968, 1969.
And we didn't know about ayahuasca.
Ayahuasca is an orally active form of DMT, but no one understood.
That pharmacology at that time.
What we did find was a paper by Schultes, the famous ethnobotanist from Harvard, that was a major influence on all of these psychedelically inclined ethnobotanists.
A paper in his own house publication called the Harvard Botanical Museum Leaflets.
And he published many, many things on South American psychedelics.
He was the pioneer.
In those days, they called them hallucinogens.
But he published a paper in that journal called Varola as an Orally Active Hallucinogen.
The Varola Paper Discovery00:02:41
That was the title.
And we stumbled on this paper and we thought, this is it, man.
This is what we're looking for.
It was this wetoto drug that they use.
Varrola is a genus of trees in the nutmeg family.
And in many tribes in the Amazon, they make snuff out of it.
The sap of Varrola is loaded with DMT and 5-methoxy-DMT and related tryptamines.
And various tribes, they extract the sap and they powder it and they mix it with ashes and they make a snuff out of it.
So effectively, it's DMT.
But this, and it's short acting, but this one tribe, the Witoto, had an orally active preparation.
They made, instead of a snuff, they made a powder out of it.
And they made a paste.
They made a little, they made, they didn't dry it down completely.
They made a sticky paste.
They rolled that in ashes and then they ate it orally.
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The effects came on very quickly and that you saw the little people.
They were big into seeing the little people and we saw little people on Dmt so we thought this is it.
El Encanto and Diet Mushrooms00:09:30
You know we got to go to South America.
That That is what led us to go to South America in 1971 to La Churera.
That was the ancestral home of the Witoto.
So we thought, we got to go to La Churera.
We have to find this thing, you know, because this is it, because it may be the ultimate mystery.
I mean, you know, you got to understand, I'm 20.
My brother is 24.
We're both fanatics.
We're batshit crazy.
You know, we're going after this quest, you know, which we thought of as the secret.
at the time.
So that's what led us to go to La Churrera, you know, was in search of this drug, which was called ukuhe in Witoto.
And we got to La Churrera, and, you know, the whole adventure of getting there is recounted in the book.
We got to La Churrera, and on the way into La Churrera, we'd encountered this anthropologist who was working with the Witoto.
And we knew he was probably going to run into him.
His colleagues in Bogota had That said, you know, Dr. Collier is out there.
You'll probably see him.
This was, you know, you didn't send texts to people or anything.
This was 1971.
So we thought, okay, we'll probably encounter Dr. Collier.
Well, we did.
We saw, we ran into Horatio Collier, which is a different name than in the book.
I've changed his name, but we ran into him in a village downriver from La Torrera called El Encanto, which is coincidence enough, syncreticity enough, because El Encanto means the enchanted, you know?
And we were on this whole mythic quest to find the secret.
And we talked to Dr. Collier and When we got there, you have to understand, we were very much in the hippie mode.
We dressed like hippies, beads, bells, you know, all that.
So when these people, these crazy people show up in the village, Dr. Kalyay is like, who the fuck are these people?
You know, and what are they here for?
Why are they here?
And when we said, we're here for Okuhei, then he really freaked out.
You know, and he's like, You can't just go in there and march in there and talk about the poo head.
He said, You know, this is their biggest shamanic secret.
I mean, they'll probably kill you if you start talking about this.
Well, you know, so we said, Okay, Doc, we understand.
We'll be cool.
We'll be discreet.
We're not just going to, you know, ask for it.
Dr. Collier, I should mention, he was a good example of someone who had a Problem with coca.
He chewed so much coca.
He's a little paranoid, you know.
He was paranoid about everything.
But we said, okay, we'll be careful when we go, you know.
And to get from El Encanto to La Churrera, we had to go overland from the Rio Igara Parana, which is where El Encanto was, to the Cara Parana.
There was a four day trail that we had to travel to get to this parallel river where La Churrera was.
And it was a trail that had been made in the rubber boom days to transport rubber out of this area and built on slavery and very, very dark history of that period.
But we went over that trail and we got to La Churrera.
And we thought, well, okay, so here we are.
They didn't have any landing strips in La Churrera.
You couldn't just fly a little plane there.
Well, there were no landing strips.
There were seaplanes, you know, river planes.
But we're, you know, hard, we're poor hippies.
We can't afford, you can't afford planes, you know.
And, you know, so that wasn't an option.
But we got there.
And at the time we got there, there were, it's a mission.
It's a mission.
A cappuccine mission was there.
There's a Church and a little mission school where the Watoto kids would come basically to have their minds poisoned with Christianity, you know.
And but it was it was between semesters or it was on vacation, so there are a lot of empty huts in the area.
So they just said, You can stay in one of these huts, you know, while you're doing whatever you're doing.
And by the way, what are you doing?
And we were sort of, you know, we're botanists, we're looking for plants, you know.
And so we got settled in.
Into this place, thought, well, you know, we will respect what Dr. Collier said.
We'll not just go out.
We'll hope somebody shows up that looks like maybe we could ask about this ukuhe.
Well, as it turned out, it was the rainy season.
And for the first, around this mission, around a couple hundred acres had been cleared, the rainforest had been cleared.
And they brought in these Cebu cattle, white humpback cattle, right?
And the ship, of those cattle happens to be the preferred substrate for Psilocybicubensis, the pantropical psilocybin mushroom, which is big and robust.
And it was rainy and there were huge clusters of these mushrooms growing out basically out of every cow pie.
And we thought, wow, this is and we knew what they were.
We had no experience with them.
We'd had one very brief experience on the way in at a village along the river, but just a very light dose because it was a, you know, It was a dry day.
By the time we got to La Truera, these things were everywhere.
And we had looked, we knew our, we had done our homework.
We knew what the mushrooms were.
But experience wise, we were very naive.
And we thought, well, that's great.
These are, we can enjoy these.
We were completely casual about it.
We were completely cavalier.
We'll have a good time with these while we're waiting for this ukuhe to show up.
Waiting for the secret to surface, you know, from some informant.
So we began eating these mushrooms and we began eating them rather frequently and rather high doses.
For one thing, they became part of our diet, you know, because there wasn't a whole lot to eat.
And the mushrooms quickly.
So you were just eating these for like breakfast, lunch, and dinner?
Well, not breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but daily or every other day and quite.
Quite substantial doses, you know, and like 10, 15 mushrooms at a time.
And these things are potent, you know, in that environment.
They're extremely potent.
But we loved this.
I mean, it was a fantastic thing.
And we, but the mushrooms quickly made it clear that they were the real secret.
They were what we had come for, not knowing it.
The kukuhe wasn't the real secret.
As it turned out, and later we did access ukuhe, and ukuhe turned out to be fairly disappointing in terms of its effects.
But the mushrooms were like, This is the most fantastic psychedelic we've ever experienced, you know.
And uh, it you have no experience with psychedelics, you're I have no experience with psychedelics, okay, other than DMT, other than DMT for the first time recently.
Well, you know DMT and psilocybin is very, very close chemically.
I've heard, yeah.
My only experience is cannabis and DMT.
Right.
Well, DMT is dimethyltryptamine.
Cannabis is 4-phosphoryl dimethyltryptamine.
So it's the perfect genetically engineered orally active form of DMT.
It's easily absorbed.
It's orally active.
It doesn't require monoamine oxidase inhibitors to be active.
It's non-toxic and it's a kick-ass psychedelic.
You know, and it puts you in about a six to seven hour intense psychedelic space, depending on how much you eat, of course.
We were eating a lot, full visionary hallucinations and all that.
One thing that psilocybin does, and other psychedelics too, ayahuasca, for example, but one thing psilocybin does, it sets up what you might call an I thou relationship with you.
Intelligent Entities and DraftKings00:03:54
It's like you get the impression that you are dealing with an intelligent entity, you know, that this isn't just a drug.
This is.
Well, our interpretation was it was some sort of uh, it either was an alien or it was a connection to an alien, okay?
It comes on as very in your face and it has stuff that it wants to tell you, like a chemical doorway to another dimension, exactly, exactly.
And it has a lot of knowledge and it's eager to impart it.
People get this on DMT too, in prolonged DMT or intense DMT states, people encounter entities.
And it's not that they just encounter entities.
The entities are happy to see you and they have stuff to tell you.
They want to teach you things.
And the psilocybin is that to the max.
And our encounters with the mushrooms quickly became a series of encounters with this entity, which we called the teach.
We called it the teacher because it presented itself as a teacher.
And it had knowledge that it wanted to impart.
Now, I told myself I wasn't going to go down this rabbit hole with you, but I guess we have to since you're.
I'm hooked in.
We have time.
You know, we have time, and this is maybe essential to the story.
So.
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Now back to the show.
So we were in this place eating these mushrooms and more or less in constant dialogue with this entity, the teacher.
And in that state, the mushroom really stimulates verbosity, you know.
Quick thinking and linguistic expression and all this.
And we were a very verbose, language oriented bunch of folks anyway.
We were very much interested in language.
For example, my brother's favorite book of all time was Finnegan's Wake, if you've ever heard of that.
Finnegan's Wake?
Standing Waveform Resonance00:15:24
Yeah, by I forget who.
Jesus, I can't, you know, con.
What was the book about?
You have to look it up.
James Joyce.
That's right.
Oh, yeah.
That's it.
Novel.
It's nice to have Google right there.
That's good.
Yes, check out.
Terrence was obsessed with James Joyce and with Finnegan's Wake, particularly.
I've not read it.
I'm honest.
I have to honestly tell you, but he read it, and very few people could understand it.
But it is the sort of ultimate instantiation of the English language.
Interesting.
Yeah.
But anyway, so that was sort of the background we were coming from.
And so the mushrooms had all this information that they wanted to download.
And I particularly began to get effectively a message from the mushroom.
Well, one thing that we noticed with the mushrooms when you take these high doses is that at high doses, you can hear this interior sound.
That in inside your head, and it's hard to characterize, it's kind of like an electrical buzzing sound.
You heard it on DMT, right?
I was not expecting this, right?
Because I didn't know, I had no conception of what to expect when I was doing this.
I was only my only expectation was what the closest I've been to this on edible marijuana, right?
Which is no, not even in the same universe, right?
And as soon as I started to effectively As soon as my soul left my body, I don't know how else to put it, I had this pulsing wow, wow, wow, like very vivid auditory sensation.
That's it.
Some people describe it as like crackling xylophane or something like that.
On DMT, you get this.
Well, on mushrooms, at high doses, not so much at lower doses, but at high doses, you hear this thing.
And not only can you hear it, But if you can sing it, you can try to imitate it with your voice, you can make this sound.
And at a certain point, your voice will lock onto this thing.
And so then you're not trying to imitate it, it just pours out of you.
And it's a very powerful sound.
I mean, it's like the kind of sound that can shatter glass, that kind of thing.
We experienced this with the mushrooms and also with DMT, but we experienced that you could make this sound and it just seemed to have a certain resonance that actually, you know, had this effect.
And so we thought, well, what is this?
The mushroom.
And the mushroom is saying, well, what this is, is it's a frequency that can activate the DNA in your neural system.
And actually create a standing waveform of your DNA to create.
I mean, I'm skipping details here, but the basic idea was that if you project this sound at a mushroom in the right circumstances, you can actually activate the DMT, the DNA in yourself and the mushroom, and create an external.
Standing waveform that you can actually see.
So it is an artifact that you're making out of your body and your mind and your brain and your DMT, your DNA, and the mushroom.
And this thing in religious traditions was, if there's any analogy to it, it's effectively the resurrection body.
We wanted to create this artifact.
You would.
Both see it and be it at the same time.
You know, it would be something external to you that you would observe.
We envision that it would be, you know, a purplish, violet, glowing disk, basically.
But it would be telepathic and it would obey your telepathic commands and it would be the ultimate object.
It would be, in fact, what Terence has since called the transcendental object at the end of time.
You know, And we thought that this was how you could create this thing.
Well, you know, 50 years from now, downstream from all that, I understand we were just nuts, you know?
I mean, because obviously it didn't happen.
I mean, we tried to create this thing.
And the prediction was that once we created it, it would propagate through basically space-time and would collapse the space-time.
Matrix and it would end history and you know, we'd all move into the singularity.
You know, pretty much instantaneously, talk about messianic inflation.
You know, this was messianic inflation on steroids.
The mushroom was downloading all this stuff like the blueprints.
How to do this, you know, to me it was like, and I was writing furiously, this is the procedure, what we must do.
We must take mushrooms, we must include ayahuasca in there, because there needs to be Harming in this mix, because harming is the resonator.
Harming actually, in ayahuasca, it's the MAO inhibitor that activates DMT, but in this particular instantiation, it was the intercalator.
Harming intercalates into DNA.
And this is known, this is scientific fact.
It intercalates into DNA, so harming became the resonator, the antenna effectively.
That could set up this standing waveform.
And the instructions were downloaded, and it was like, this is what you have to do.
You have to sing to the mushroom in this way, in this very, very controlled situation, and you will create this artifact.
I don't normally cop to this.
I mean, yeah, you're looking at me like, gee, should I call somebody?
Hold on.
I mean, I'm sane.
I'm totally.
This isn't the craziest thing I've ever heard.
Yeah.
At the time, I was.
Well, so we did this, right?
And I performed this experiment and the prediction was that this was going to happen.
Well, obviously it couldn't happen.
It would violate every law of physics known if this had happened.
But we now, would this thing hypothetically only appear when you're under the influence of psilocybin mushrooms or DMT or would this actually appear when you're not under the influence?
Our supposition is that once it was there, it would be there.
Okay.
And it would be something that would be controlled by thought.
And it would have access to all information and it would have access to all effectively throughout the cosmos.
It would be a standing waveform like an electron in some ways.
The electron doesn't have a boundary.
Its boundary is space-time itself.
This would be like that.
But there would be a physical.
Part of it that we could actually that would be the time machine, the time, everything, an everything machine, everything, a time machine, a UFO machine, the transcendental object at the end of time, the ultimate technology, you know, that would be made from our brains, our nervous system, our thought, and that of the mushroom.
And, uh, that you know, this would be this would be it.
This would well, that didn't happen.
That couldn't happen.
We, we did the experiment and uh, at first we're doing this in the dark, in the, in the hut, and there's, there's a light, you know, on on the mushroom in front of it and, and after i'd made the third, uh scream you probably read about this right in in the book.
After i'd made the third, then the light from my Ruana, my Serapi, fell on the mushroom and exactly bisected it.
And I was looking at it and I looked at Terrence and I said, This is our world.
This is what we're looking at.
And it did.
We had this idea that this was all being controlled by, you know, dome headed beings from 22,000 miles out in orbit that were directing the whole thing, you know.
And I said, This is our world.
And so What happened was, because what we'd projected couldn't possibly happen, but what happened was that I basically detached from reality, you know, for about two weeks.
And Terrence detached from reality also, but in a different way.
It was like in a complimentary way.
This was about taking a template, kind of a.
Reverse negative image of each other's DNA because we were brothers, right?
And it was opposite.
It's very hard to articulate.
It was hard to articulate it even then, but even more so now because I'm so distant from it.
At the time, it made perfect sense.
It made perfect sense to Terrence and me that this had happened.
And at the end of this experiment, we thought we have succeeded.
We succeeded.
But the timing of the appearance of this stone, we thought of it as a stone, as in philosopher's stone.
The timing for the appearance of this art attack, basically, we were correct.
We were incorrect about when it was going to manifest.
It didn't manifest immediately.
So the question is well, when?
When is it going to show up?
And.
Our companions who were there who hadn't participated in this experiment were like appalled, totally appalled.
It's like we need to get these people airlifted out of there and into a psychiatric facility as soon as possible.
But it wasn't possible.
Sorry, go ahead.
It's good that it wasn't possible because that would have aborted what was happening.
And that And that would have, I have no doubt that if that had happened, that would have left me at least insane, you know, probably for the rest of my life, lost in this delusional place.
I don't know what it would have done to Terrence, but the fact that we could not end it gave it all a possibility, the opportunity to play out.
And what played out over about the next 10 days or so was that Terrence, I became. adrift in the cosmos.
I was basically, my mind felt that I felt, well, there wasn't really an I anymore, but this entity that I transformed myself into felt like I was, my circumference was identical with the circumference of the universe.
You know, I was, you've heard about being one with the cosmos.
Well, Man, I was one with the cosmos.
I was the cosmos.
But over the next 10 days or so, I began to condense.
Each 24 hours, I started falling back together.
And each 24 hours, I was a little more condensed.
Like it started with the circumference of the cosmos.
The next, it was the galactic cluster.
The next, it was the galaxy.
The next, the solar system.
The next earth, the next, and each one, and each one, I was sort of coming back into my body and into my mind, you know.
And uh, and Terrence simultaneously, so I was three sheets to the wind, you know, I couldn't look after myself.
10 days, 10 days, you said this was.
I forget the exact time frame, 10 days, 10 about 10 to 14 days.
Did you have any relationship to physical reality back on earth, or was it like?
How did you get through the day?
Well, people had to look after me, you know, and because I was joined to everybody, like my companion, for example, if I wanted to smoke a cigarette, I would ask Sarah to smoke a cigarette and I could enjoy the cigarette that she was smoking.
Or if I want, you know, because I was connected to everybody and, you know, and, or if I needed to take a shit, I could ask somebody else to do it and they would do it and that would.
In my mind, of course, not in reality, but in my mind.
And so I was really divorced from what we would call reality.
My brother simultaneously was hypervigilant.
He did not sleep for 14 days and he was constantly keeping an eye on me.
He was looking after me.
That's probably why I wasn't sleeping.
UFO Encounter with Terrence Low00:04:54
I mean, it was probably, I've often joked, well, you've been trying to drive me crazy all of your life.
Now you finally succeed.
So, don't you feel guilty about that.
And in fact, I think he probably did.
And he was looking after me.
He was making sure that no harm would come to me.
But at the same time, he wasn't sleeping.
And he was wandering the pastures day and night, mostly at night, just wandering the pastures.
And he was thinking about time, thinking about cycles, thinking about the timing of this event.
Related to the death of our mother, which had taken place like six months previously, and projecting time in the forward, and he was making all these diagrams on the ground with sticks about time cycles and all that.
And eventually, those ideas became condensed or evolved into what became his theories about time wave zero.
Right.
Right.
The time map effectively based on the I Ching, but it took years to get to that point.
But the kernel of that idea.
We saw he thought something was going to happen in December of the year 2000, right?
In December of 2012.
2012.
2012.
And where that date came from came out of our.
Expectation of when was the stone going to appear.
And in the early days there, when we were both still completely batshit and all this was happening, he used to take me to the pasture every morning and he'd say, Give it to me.
Give it to me.
Make it happen.
I'm like, I don't know.
What am I supposed to do?
But it was like we were trying to force the condensation of the stone.
Eventually, I came back more or less to normal, and he did too.
During that period, he also had this encounter with the UFO.
I don't know if you read that part.
No, I didn't read that part.
In the book, I mean, at one of these early morning wanderings, he was standing by the river and by the Choro, which was this waterfall.
That's what La Torreira is named for, looking across the river.
And there were clouds across the river, and they started to roil and boil.
And then this UFO condensed out of the clouds, you know.
And I didn't see this, so I can't vouch that it happened, you know, but I believe it probably did.
It came out of the clouds, and, you know, he was obviously terrified, and it, you know, making the usual flying saucer noises.
And it was one of these things.
It was an absurdity.
It was the exact.
You know, other UFO researchers, people like Jacques Valet and so on, have always talked about how there's an element of the absurd in a lot of these experiences.
And this was that, because the flying saucer was an exact representation of Adamski's flying saucer, which he had talked about, which he actually made a photograph of, which was shown to be you know, a fake made from a Hoover vacuum cleaner.
Really?
Yeah.
What's it called?
A Damsky?
George Adamsky.
He was a famous UFO nut back at this time and talked about UFOs and was, you know, probably just crazy.
Like I should talk, right?
But.
Find his UFO.
It was, yeah, George Adamsky.
There you go.
Do you have a picture of his UFO?
Yes, that's a picture of his UFO.
Yes, it was that UFO.
Oh, wow.
Exactly.
God, the internet is a wonderful thing, or maybe not.
But yeah, it was that UFO.
And it was coming at Terrence low, and it was humming, and it was very threatening, you know?
And he was like, what the fuck?
And he was terrified.
Temporal Singularity and Time Travel00:07:23
And then it just went over, and that was it.
And I don't believe Terrence made this up.
You know, why would he?
You know, unless just to tell a good story, and it's possible.
I mean, he was always happy to tell a good story.
I can't verify it.
But why?
Why would that happen?
So this was just one of many anomalous things that was happening.
There was that was happening during this period.
I could we were telepathic.
We could understand each other.
Our companions, like I say, were appalled.
But Terry and I were in telepathic.
Communication.
What we were doing made perfect sense to us.
We understood.
And so a lot of what we were trying to do was to manifest not only this artifact, but this thing that comes out of the sound, which we call translinguistic matter.
A new kind of language where to say something was to see something.
It's the unification of of visual and auditory energy so that if you spoke in this translinguistic language, you could manifest something like casting a spell, you know, effectively.
To say it was to make it.
Crazy stuff, you know.
And so that was it.
During that time, that whole entire period of 10 days roughly, were you guys Constantly taking mushrooms?
No, no.
This was, we'd stopped taking mushrooms.
You had stopped.
Oh, yeah.
This was just like an after effect of that.
This was whatever we'd triggered.
Yeah.
We weren't taking mushrooms anymore.
We didn't have to take mushrooms.
This was not about, this was not about being on mushrooms.
You know, we'd done the mushrooms and maybe at toxic levels, maybe they were continuing in our, in our system, but their half-life is short.
They don't last days.
They last hours.
And so, no, this was some, if you want to look at it biochemically, go the reductionist route for a minute.
What did we do?
We took a lot of mushrooms, we made this sound.
We may have jammed open some system, you know, in the neural system, maybe prolonged monoamine oxidase inhibition or something like that.
If we want to reach out for a reductionist explanation, it could have been some kind of serious neural disruption of our neurochemistry.
And eventually that re equilibrated.
And we came down more or less.
It took a while.
Even, well, so to continue this story and sort of how it played out, I was pretty much dissociated for a long time.
Terrence was looking after me.
All our companions were worried.
And I always wanted to wander off.
I wanted to go wander off because I needed to be out there healing people.
Right?
I mean, that was my thing.
I had this messianic desire to share my powers, you know, and heal people.
Well, one day I got away from them and I climbed the bell tower of the mission and I started ringing the bell, the whole community was alarmed, you know.
I mean, they already knew that these people were weird and there was very strange stuff going on, but we had really.
Disrupted the peace of the community, but I broke that.
And they were like, What the fuck?
Who is this guy?
He's clearly gone bananas.
And so they said, Your friend is not in control, and for his own good, we're going to confine him.
The police, it was a police outpost as well as a mission.
We're going to put him in this room here and keep him there.
For a while.
Hopefully, he'll fall down, he'll calm down.
Not in any way, just trying to be helpful, basically, not unkind.
And I could care less because I wasn't really connected to it.
And at the same time, about that time, one of our companions who had not participated in that was concerned and she was thinking that we needed to get out of there.
And she also sprained her ankle rather badly.
So that was sort of a trigger.
It's like, okay, enough of this nonsense.
We're going to call in a plane and have you guys airlifted out of here.
We're going to get airlifted out of here, which we could do.
You know, there's radio.
There was a Bush pilot that would come deliver mail occasionally to La Torreira, like about once a month.
So we put in an emergency call to him, and he took us out.
And we went to Laetitia and we ended up in this hotel for a while.
And I'm still, you know, really pretty shaky.
And Terrence, but Terrence, because he's hypervigilant, he was, you know, looking after everything.
Spent a few days in that hotel and eventually, you know, continued this condensation process and pretty much returned to more or less my baseline.
And then I, you know, we went back to Bogota and I arranged to come home.
And at this point, I was like, I don't want anything to do with this.
You know, I just want to be a normal guy.
I just want to get my feet on the ground.
I don't know what was going on, you know, but whatever it was, I'm glad I'm sane.
I'm glad I'm functional and I want to go home and I want to study, return to the university.
And just live my life, you know.
And which I, so I did eventually go back.
I changed my studies from what I had been studying.
It was basically anthropology and religious studies, that sort of thing.
But I started studying chemistry.
I started studying harder sciences.
I studied biology, pharmacology, chemistry, all that thing.
Pursuing Hard Sciences Later00:13:06
And Part of the motivation for that was that Terrence was saying, and even before we'd done the experiment, but afterwards definitely, he was saying, you know, science will never explain this, you know.
And I was saying, well, wait a minute, we're not scientists, you know.
So you can't say that until we know how to do science.
You can't really dismiss science.
And so I thought, I'm going to study science.
And that was kind of what put me on that trajectory.
Terrence, on the other hand, was convinced that we had succeeded and that the timing of this, that effectively we were, that the timing of the appearance of this or this anomaly in the cosmic space time stream, we'd just been wrong about when it was going to happen.
So, in some sense, I mean, it sounds cruel to say, and I don't mean it to, he, Persisted for years with the idea that we had succeeded.
And he built the time wave around this idea.
And he built a career around this.
And he was such a persuasive speaker that he got a lot of people to buy into it.
And I was pretty much a skeptic at the time.
I've always been kind of a skeptic of the time wave.
I think the time wave.
Was a beautiful mathematical construction around the I Ching.
It is not a picture of, it's not a map of time.
It doesn't have any predictive qualities.
It works very well as a calendar.
And if he'd left it at that, he would have gotten a lot of recognition from sinologists and scholars of the I Ching, but not much else.
But by insisting that it predicted this eruption of this anomaly into space time, and there were many dates along the way that were identified with cometary passages and this sort of thing,
kept revising the dates and eventually settled on this date of December 21st, 2012, which it didn't hurt that he arrived at that date.
Independently by looking at all these maps of 384 day cycles based on the I Ching.
84 days is six times 64, right?
And the I Ching is all about sixes and multiples of sixes because of the hexagrams.
So he settled on this date of December 21st, 2012.
And then it came to his attention that that was actually a very key date in the Mayan calendar, the end of the 13th Bakhtun, in which the, you know, Another one of these world transitions was predicted in the Mayan calendars.
Not the end of the world, but some people interpreted it that way.
So we thought, well, that's affirmation that we're on the right track here.
So we'll set that as the end date.
And it should happen at that time.
And well, he didn't live to see it.
But there was a lot of excitement about that date.
Because of the Mayans and largely because of the memes that Terrence was releasing, had released into the Mimo sphere.
A lot of people were excited about that date and they expected something to happen.
As you know, there were, you know, watch parties.
People were going down to, you know, Palenque and places like this to wait for it and so on.
I remember.
Nothing happened.
You know, it was like the biggest non event in human history.
You know, so.
That was, to my mind, that was the definitive invalidation of the time wave.
I mean, Terrence and I used to have, we used to argue about the time wave, or shall we say, have lively discussions, because I was a skeptic and I was saying, for all sorts of reasons, this doesn't really, it's not really a map of time.
I mean, the idea was that.
The wave described the ingression of novelty into the continuum.
And this is a concept that goes back to Alfred North Whitehead.
Alfred North Whitehead talks about novelty as something that appears.
Novelty is basically that every day something happens that never before occurred in the history of the universe.
Novel events, right?
Time wave is an attempt to chart the ingression of novelty into the continuum, the ingression of novel events, and to quantify them, you know.
And that was what it supposedly did, charted.
And the end of the time wave was the ultimate ingression of novelty when this would all collapse into a singularity because the cycles were a spiral getting tighter and tighter all the time, right?
Right.
Going back.
Really, billions of years or even trillions of years.
But in the last nanoseconds of the time wave, everything was going to just collapse.
It would be a complete transformation.
And so that was the theory.
That was the idea.
The spiral makes sense because he talked about time speeding up, right?
Right.
And the fractal nature of time.
All of these cycles were fractals of each other getting tighter and tighter and tighter.
Until finally, they're basically nanoseconds and even less.
So it's like a, you know, how a black hole is a singularity based on mass.
And if it's small enough, you get a singularity.
Well, this was a temporal singularity.
You know, this was the collapse of the temporal continuum, you know, into something that could not be described by the laws of physics.
And Terrence and I used to have these conversations, and I would say, well, Terrence, the problem is, the problem with the time wave theory is that it can't be disproven, right?
You cannot define the criteria that would disprove it.
Right.
You know, and so it's not a theory because this is what science does, right?
Science constructs hypotheses, it constructs suppositions, essentially, very highly structured suppositions about a phenomenon in nature or some process and so on.
And if you practice science honestly, you construct a hypothesis and then you say, Tyrus, you try like hell to demolish it.
You try to say, what data does this not account for?
What are the incompletenesses?
What are the deficiencies in the hypothesis?
And then you either try to answer those, you elaborate the hypothesis, you revise it, try to account for the data that it doesn't account for, or you shit can the whole thing and replace it with something else.
This is like the transition between Newtonian mechanics and relativity.
I mean, Einstein came up with relativity, and in the normal experience of reality, and that we experience on the Level, Einstein, Newtonian mechanics works perfectly well.
But at these relativistic dimensions and speeds and so on, that all falls apart and it's real.
And Einstein came along and said, Well, this experience, this relativity explains this.
We know it doesn't appear to make sense because we're not in that relativistic places all the time, but this does actually explain it.
And And so in science, this happens.
You know, one paradigm gives away to another as new information comes available.
And that's what we were postulating, or what Terrence was postulating.
Well, so the time wave failed its definitive test.
December 21st, 2012, came along and nothing happened.
And that was kind of the ultimate test that he'd postulated.
Does that ultimately mean that it means that it failed, or is it?
Possible that it could happen sometime in the future at another date.
You know, that's the thing about, you know, Terrence was, I think, self admittedly very slippery with his ideas, right?
You got it.
Well, just going on these psychedelic voyages and downloading this knowledge and being able to form it into a coherent idea that you can articulate with words.
Some of these concepts and these ideas almost by design cannot be measured and weighed scientifically, right?
They don't necessarily pass scientific method muster.
But that doesn't mean necessarily that they're not useful, right?
No, they are useful.
I mean, all of this, I mean, here's the thing in science you never prove anything.
All hypotheses, all scientific concepts, science is simply a way of asking very structured questions about nature.
You never prove your hypotheses.
Because there always may be data that comes in next week, next month, 50 years from now, 100 years ago, that invalidates your hypothesis.
All you can say is based on the data that we have, what we know now, this hypothesis, whatever it is, appears to be valid.
You know, that's the way science works.
And that was what was lacking in Terence's construct.
He was arguing, he was trying to prove it.
And.
You don't ever, you don't arrive at proof.
All you can do is say what we, what we suppose, the hypothesis that we've constructed.
We can't disprove it, and I guess you could say that.
But the thing is there's not enough.
The time wave in itself doesn't have enough data to really be able to say that, because in in some ways it's it.
There are holes in it.
I mean, there are big holes that you can drive a truck through.
For example, it does not take account of relativity.
It does not take, if it's a model of time, like the work that the guy that you had on the podcast, time is not something that applies to the entire universe.
There are regions where time is different than where it is now.
Of time travel is actually a possibility.
But the time wave was like, nope, this is it.
This describes the entire space time continuum.
And it didn't, obviously.
And there are other things that, well, actually, again, I don't want to feel like I'm putting my brother down.
Doubts About the Time Wave00:15:18
I mean, I had tremendous respect for him, and he was a brilliant guy.
But the way he was trying to prove the time wave, it had more – the time wave was more about him than it was about time.
It was about his personality, his understanding of history, which was deep.
I mean, he was an incredible scholar of history.
And it was about – one of the things that we used to – Have in our conversations about novelty was what is really novel?
What is novelty?
And we talked about, I mean, and he said, well, events like the first time an atomic bomb was ever detonated on the earth, that's a novel event.
So that would be a spike.
That would be a major marker to put down in this evolution of novelty.
Or the first time a An animal was cloned, or various kinds of scientific discoveries.
But I would say so he was sort of a proponent of the eruptive idea of novelty.
Things burst into the continuum, and are these novel events?
And I advocated the idea that novelty kind of leaks into the continuum.
It kind of oozes into the continuum.
For example, you couldn't get to the atomic bomb.
Einstein had to have the idea first about E equals mc squared, and then all these physicists came along and they developed nuclear reactions, controlled nuclear reactions, all of these things.
These were novel events, but they didn't get a lot of attention.
But they created the foundation.
Of new discoveries, so that when the bomb finally exploded, it was possible to develop that because the foundation of understanding was there.
And those were novel discoveries, but they weren't dramatic in that way.
Am I making sense?
No, that makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, you have.
So novelty is there all the time.
Right.
Yes, it's a compounding progression, right?
Things emerge out of other.
Exactly.
Bigger ideas emerge from smaller ideas combined, you know, with collaboration and the evolution of ideas and these things.
Exactly.
And this was so Terrence, you know, he approached this.
He was not a mathematician, although the time wave is a mathematical construct.
He was not a statistician, which would have been useful, you know, to bring the theory to it.
He was basically a historian.
And his, so he was mapping with this time wave, was his view of history.
And there are maps of the time wave.
I think they're reproduced in True Hallucinations.
These huge maps.
And the idea that time is fractal, that every cycle is a reflection of the super cycles and the sub cycles, so that you could see these historical resonances, you know.
And, uh, It's a fascinating idea.
It is.
And in some sense, it's true, but I don't think you can reduce it to a mathematical construct that you can.
I mean, people have put the time wave into software and you can run all sorts of programs and so on.
But at the end of the day, it's Terrence's view of history that's being mapped.
What do you think his.
Primary motivations were with all this stuff.
What drove him?
Terrence was a complex person.
Yeah.
Very complex person.
I think a few things drove him.
I think that first, it was just curiosity.
I mean, there was no motivation in really except an interest and understanding.
And he was having these revelations and.
And they seemed valid, and he was taking psychedelics, and he was just a curious person.
And that's a very good quality in a scientist or anyone else.
I mean, I don't think he would call himself a scientist because he dismissed science.
He said, Science is never going to answer this.
But I think eventually he reached a point where it became.
A shtick.
You know, he built a career on this.
Right.
And talking about the time wave and talking about psychedelics and being such an excellent speaker, you know, I used to tell him, you could stand up there and read the phone book and people would be hanging on every word, you know, because it's not what you say, it's how you say it, you know.
And I used to tell him, he hated for me to go to his seminars and so on, because, you know, Because I was the only one that would ever stand up and say anything.
Everybody else is just slack chod.
And I would sometimes get up and say, Well, what you said 20 minutes ago didn't make sense.
And what you're saying now doesn't make sense.
And it exactly contradicts what you just said.
And he would just say, Well, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
And just carry on.
Awesome.
Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
Oh, wow.
So it became an act in a certain way.
And it was a career.
People wanted to listen to him.
Honestly, his best talks were not about the Brothers McKenna or the Time Wave idea.
I mean, he talked about those things a lot, you know, and these ideas.
His best talks, in my opinion, were.
When they drew from his vast knowledge of history and esotericism and alchemy and Jungian psychology and all that, and some of those talks are just mind boggling, you know, and they do not really have to invoke this delusion.
I mean, this is the thing.
It's like I had this experience, I had this serious break from reality.
Eventually, I recovered.
In some ways, you could say Terence didn't recover.
He remained invested in this illusion, delusion rather, that began at La Torreira and it really persisted throughout most of his life.
He couldn't let it go.
At a certain point, he reached a point where I know later in life he had doubts, a lot of doubts.
There were other people who came along who were mathematicians, who were better.
They actually understood the time way better than he did, and they came forth.
And he, I think later in life, he began to feel that, you know, the idea wasn't valid, you know, and it really disturbed him.
It really dismayed him because by this time it was his career, you know, and I can understand, you know, why he would not want to let it go.
But.
Sometimes you have to let things go.
And then, of course, at the same time, so I know that the years before the end of his life were very difficult.
He was depressed in a lot of ways.
And people who I mean, Terrence was like this huge, iconic public figure, but he was also a person.
He had a family.
You know, a difficult marriage.
He had, you know, personal things, the kind of thing that we all have to deal with because we're human, whether we like it or not, and we have to deal with those things.
And I think that his public persona and meeting the expectations of his fan base became, you know, difficult for him.
Very, almost like he wanted to retreat from it all, you know, in a certain way through self doubt, you know.
And I used to tell him.
Well, later in life, although we had been so close during all this period, we sort of drifted apart.
But then when he got sick again, I was there for him very much.
And I was sort of, I would say, you don't have to believe in this.
You don't have to be anything other than just be yourself, because you are a remarkable person.
You don't have to meet other people's expectations, you know.
But he always sort of was reluctant to give that up.
And I guess anyone would be.
And in some sense, I'm always, I'm sort of glad that I never, you know, I sort of didn't like, didn't go for this high public visibility thing.
Right.
Especially after, you know, I mean, I went back to school and I just said, okay, I'm going to do science, damn it.
And I'm going to, Be an ethnobotanist.
I'm going to pursue that.
That's what I want to do.
And I don't have to be a super famous person.
And so I did that.
And I kind of deliberately stayed in the background and I pursued these other pathways, you know, which I continue to pursue.
And I don't have to tie myself or my ideas to a concept that basically.
You can't prove.
Right.
You know, so, so, so I just said, okay, not that I don't, I mean, it's complicated to talk about, Danny.
It's not that I dismiss what went on.
I, in some ways, you know, we were 20 when we went to La Torreira, Terrence was 24.
Most of our lives have been lived in the shadow of the events that happened at that time, you know, but I'm 74 now.
So, a lot of years have gone by since then.
And I've lived a life and I've made a career such that it is.
And I've made contributions to the field of ethnobotany and mostly that.
I mean, some neuroscience, but that was kind of a detour when I did my postdocs.
But always with psychedelics, have been the continuing carrot for me and Terrence for all of our lives.
I mean, that's what got us fascinated.
And we each pursued it in our own way, you know.
And I continue to pursue it, but I'm, you know, I'm, you know, it's not my obsession.
I'm not fanatical about it.
I just think they're very valuable.
You know, people say, for example, one of the, you know, so you did all these things and you didn't disrupt the space time continuum.
You didn't do any of this.
None of this stuff happened.
What happened?
What was important about that?
I'll tell you what was important as I view it.
We brought back the spores of the mushrooms from La Charera.
And we played around with those for a couple of years, trying to figure out how to grow them.
Finally, almost by accident, I figured out how to grow them.
You know, and the initial very simple technique growing these things out of mason jars and all that.
Very simple.
I basically tried, there was a mycologist who worked for the USDA who published this paper in Mycologia, how you could grow small amounts of agaricus bisporus on sterilized substrates in mason jars for genetic research and that sort of thing.
And I had the spores, I had the mycelium, and I decided, well, give it a shot.
Let's see if it works.
And what do you know?
It worked very well.
So suddenly mushrooms were back in our lives again.
You know, we had access to mushrooms and we were very happy about that.
And we decided to publish this book, Psilocybin Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide, which is still available.
And we published it and it got a lot of notice.
And now, of course, there are lots of simpler, better ways to grow mushrooms.
This was a very simple technique that almost anybody could do.
And we published this book and it got a lot of notice.
So people say, what was the real impact of our trip to La Churrera?
That was the impact.
This had a tangible effect on society because it brought mushrooms basically within the reach of anyone.
Anyone with a bit of patience and a spare room could grow lots of mushrooms if they wanted to.
And we did.
And those mushrooms got out there.
The book got out there.
So that.
Therapeutic Benefits of Psilocybin00:11:12
Was that had a social impact?
Nothing supernatural about it or anything.
It was just we sort of stumbled on this method and we shared that method.
And that's had a big impact because at that period, you know, psychedelics were not popular.
Psychedelics were, you know, very much oppressed by the government and a lot of people were scared.
But people that were really interested had a way to, as Terrence said, Sometimes, as he once said, just a simple way to get great dope out of mason jars.
And people did.
And it kept them sort of alive and people's attention.
So then later, when clinicians and people like that decided that they wanted to start working with psychedelics, mushrooms were obviously the one to use because, in some ways, mushrooms are the ideal psychedelic.
More than LSD or mescaline or some of these things.
More than DMT?
More than DMT.
Why is that?
Again, because the DMT only lasts 20 minutes.
Right.
Well, unless you do it with the ayahuasca in the form of ayahuasca.
If you do it with ayahuasca, it lasts, yeah, six hours or so.
But ayahuasca is a botanical formulation, it's complex and all that.
But psilocybin, you can synthesize it.
And of course, clinical trials, you know, the FDA likes, they want to work with pure compounds.
they're very biased toward pure compounds.
You can work with natural drugs, but generally if you're like an investigator like Roland Giffus, for example, at Johns Hopkins, people that started doing clinical studies, they expect you to do it with pure compounds.
Psilocybin's easy to make if you're a good chemist.
Albert Hoffman synthesized it in 1958.
And so it sort of kept it on the radar.
And then when people were looking at it from a therapeutic point of view, psilocybin seemed a natural choice.
And it has a lot of things that recommend it because it lasts about the right amount of time.
It's six or seven hours.
Like LSD is 12 to 18 hours, depending.
Mescaline is, you have to take higher doses, and it lasts a long time.
So it lasts about the same time.
It's very non toxic.
It's totally compatible with human metabolism.
And it's a kick ass psychedelic.
I mean, depending on the dose, it can be a fairly mild experience, but still very interesting.
Or in a higher experience, it can be, you know, complete with visions and all that.
And it can really be, you know, it can really.
Be therapeutic, you know.
Like Wade Davis often says a story he tells, he said, Well, you know, our parents back in the 60s, they would say, You must never take these things because if you do, you'll never be the same again.
That's the fucking point.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that goes to something I wanted to ask you.
Like, what is, do you think there is a fundamental change in the brain?
That lasts, and how long does it last when you take these psychedelics, whether it be ayahuasca, DMT, or psilocybin?
And is there like something that is unlocked?
Yes, yes.
The answer is the data is coming out that, in fact, there are long term changes in the brain in a beneficial way.
So there are short term changes.
There's the trip that you have, you know, and the trip that you have.
The therapeutic sort of mechanism behind the benefits of psychedelics, whether psilocybin or LSD or whatever, you've heard of this concept of the default mode network.
Oh, that's a neuroscience term.
The default mode network is basically the neural mechanisms that feedback, internal neural feedback, Mechanisms that maintain what we call ordinary consciousness effectively.
Our focus on space and time, our sense of self and being localized.
Ordinary consciousness, that's the default mode network.
Most of the time, the default mode network is where you want to be because you want to be functional.
You want to be able to drive a car and get up and go to work, pay the mortgage, do these things, ordinary functionally.
But it can also be a trap.
And particularly for people with like intractable depression and that sort of thing, their default mode network in some ways is dysfunctional.
And they don't, you know, they're in these feedback loops that are harmful, that are not supporting their mental health.
What the psychedelics do is they temporarily disable that default mode network.
They effectively let you step out of your reference frame.
That's another way to think of it.
It lets you look at your situation.
From a different perspective, you've stepped out of your reference frame.
So, if you look at your depression or your trauma, your addiction, or various problems that you're facing, you could look at that in a different way.
And in that way, you can sort of defuse it.
You can sort of overcome that and you can resolve a lot of those things.
So, that's the immediate therapeutic benefit of something like psilocybin.
And one session may do it, or it may take Two or three, but basically it will resolve it.
However, what they now know is there are persistent changes that last longer than that, long after the trip is over.
What we're seeing is, and by we, I mean neuroscientists, not me.
So, you know, this is all in the literature.
What's happening is there is a change in connectivity of the synapses in the brain, sort of a re arborist, re.
Change that reflects these changes that you're having in the therapeutic state.
Connectivity and also the two words are synaptogenesis, forming of connections between neurons, and neurogenesis, which is growth actually of new neurons.
Wow.
Psilocybin and other psychedelics initiate these processes.
So, yes, it rewires your brain.
In ways that are beneficial largely.
So I noticed this after this could have been placebo, but I noticed after the DMT, which I've never noticed with anything else, is that I felt like I was thinking differently.
Yeah, you do.
Like I was thinking, I was able to see problems from multiple angles at once.
It was very strange.
That's exactly right.
It changes your perspective on things.
And this can be very, very helpful and very therapeutic.
particularly if you're trying, if you're dealing with something like intractable depression.
I mean, so-called major depressing disorder, which is a clinically defined state, is what psilocybin was initially approved for in clinical studies.
But now that it's getting approved, it's applied to all these other things.
For example, smoking cessation.
There are studies with smoking cessation, with psilocybin, lifetime serious cigarette addicts, three pack a day, people over decades, you know, the treatment with psilocybin over, you know, three or four treatments with the proper integration, preparation, all that, three or four treatments, 80% of those people stopped smoking.
Wow.
Just stopped.
And you know why?
I think, I mean, being Experience myself with psilocybin and also a former smoker.
Psilocybin didn't make me stop smoking.
Various other things did.
But I think what people, you know, if they come into it with a real sincere desire to stop smoking, you know, they have this experience and they look at what they're doing to their body and how, you know, they're poisoning themselves.
And it's like the reaction is repulsion or revulsion, you know, and it's like they're able to stop.
Yeah.
And no other treatment for smoking cessation even comes close.
80% of the sample, these were lifelong smokers.
That's so fascinating.
This is all done at Johns Hopkins.
This is Matt Johnson's work, basically, one of Roland Griffith's proteges at the time.
So that's an example of what these things are.
But the thing is, you do not have to be sick to benefit from psychedelics.
I mean, it's approved.
For therapeutic uses, but things like PTSD and addiction and so on.
But it can be used to benefit well people as well because it does.
It improves your outlook, it improves the way that you think.
In fact, one of my colleagues, I was going to recommend that you bring him on the podcast, a good friend of mine and Terrence, a guy named Bruce Damer.
Bruce Damer and Exobiology00:15:40
How do you spell his last name?
D A M E R.
Okay.
So he's an exobiologist.
He's an engineer and a biochemist, and he studies exobiology the study of extraterrestrial life.
Well, there is no extraterrestrial life that we have to study right now.
So what we have, what he studies is the origin of life.
And he and his colleagues have developed some very groundbreaking theories about the origin of life.
And you can look him up, you can look up his website and all that.
But what's interesting is that psychedelics has been very useful to him as a creative tool, effectively as a scientific tool, a tool for thinking about nature and new processes.
He's even founded an organization called minds.org.
Which is, he and some colleagues are developing structured protocols to use psychedelics to apply to scientific problems.
Because again, it's this ability to step out of your usual reference frame.
Yes.
You can look at your own problems.
You can also look at nature and you can see things about processes, about natural processes that you miss.
One of the things I often say about psychedelics, they bring the background forward.
Yes, yes.
That's a great way of putting it.
That's the default mode network.
The default mode network is defined by what it excludes from your awareness, right?
Because it makes sure that your attention is focused on the immediate things you need to survive.
If you're on the freeway, You know, 90 miles an hour, you really don't want elves materializing out of the, you know, you don't need that.
That's not.
But if in a controlled state, and this is why the concept of set and setting is so important, in the proper set and setting, you're in a situation where you can let that default mode network dissolve.
And then all the things that it's filtering out can come in and you can experience them in a non threatening situation.
And you can experience this background, which is always there, but we're genetically and evolutionarily programmed to exclude those things, especially in the West.
An indigenous person has much less of this.
If you go into a forest with an indigenous person who lives in nature, that person is likely to notice processes that are always going on, but you don't see them.
You don't see them until they're pointed out, right?
Because you're programmed not to see them.
Like, what kind of processes are you talking about?
Just anything you might look at, you know, the way an anthill works, you know, the way the sun lands on a leaf, the way, you know, the way ecosystems work and all of this.
You can sort of psychedelics can be a lens.
Effectively, it's like a scientific instrument.
You can train that.
You can look at phenomena, maybe things that you've looked at before that you feel that you understand very well.
But When you look at them from the psychedelic perspective, you notice things that you never noticed before.
And this has been proven.
I mean, there are people who have won Nobel Prizes based on this.
Kerry Mullis, for example, is famous for, you know, he discovered the PCR.
PCR, yeah.
Yeah.
And he's quite out front.
He was like, LSD, you know, gave me the tools to understand this process that gave me the ability to, As he put it, get down among the molecules and see what was going on.
And so Bruce Dahmer and his colleagues are effectively trying to develop, you know, structured protocols to use psychedelics for this kind of thing, for problems in physics, chemistry, mathematics, and so on.
All these people are, you know, obviously far gone nerds, but very, very smart people.
And, uh, Bruce is just an amazing, amazing person.
He's given talks at our ESPD conferences.
The last one, the ESPD is something the McKenna Academy did.
The Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs was one of two conferences that we did.
And ESPD 55 was in 2022.
If people go to the website, they can see that.
You can listen to Bruce's talk.
And all the other talks, too.
You might want to put that conference to people's attention.
And just, he's an incredibly brilliant mind, you know, and all the people that he's working with.
And he also, another interesting thing about Bruce is he is one of these people that, you know, he's one of these people that naturally can get into this psychedelic place.
He's Talks about endowasca.
He seems to be someone that's able to induce psychedelic experiences based on his own neurochemistry.
Wow.
You know, there are people like this.
And he told me, he told me that's why I never took psychedelics for so long because I didn't really want to disrupt this.
You know, I told him, forget it, Bruce, take psychedelics.
And he did.
He did.
What took me so long to jump to the DMT thing, to experiment with DMT was because my only experience is with marijuana and I'm an extreme lightweight.
So I could many times.
Go way overboard by accident to where I'm white knuckling my chair and hurling through the void of my deepest, darkest fears.
And everything is coming at me at once.
And it's everything is the worst case scenario.
Every worst case scenario I could imagine in my life is all happening to me simultaneously.
And it's terrifying.
And that wasn't the experience with DMT.
But going back to that, even though it's so terrifying and my worst fears are creeping in.
There's always something positive I can take from it.
There's always at least one thing where I'll be like, oh, where's the pen?
Where's the pen?
I need to write this down.
Like something I can pull out of that alien realm that is going to be extremely useful for me.
That's right.
That's right.
You can do that.
And this is where, you know, nobody wants to have terrifying experiences, but sometimes it does.
This is where sentence setting comes in, you know, especially with.
These strong psychedelics.
You have to pay attention to set and setting.
And, like, I assume that a lot of your terrifying experiences were on cannabis, right?
Cannabis can be very much like a psychedelic at high doses, you know?
But set and setting are the key variables.
Leary and Mechner and all these people were right back in the 60s.
They were talking about it.
So, setting, obviously, is where you do it.
I mean, you want to do it in a place that you feel comfortable, that you feel safe.
Those are the main things that, you know, are whether outside or inside or whatever.
That's less important as long as you feel like you're in a safe environment.
Because you're deliberately putting yourself in a situation where you have to let all your defenses down, all this dissolve, this default mode network, let it dissolve.
That can be very threatening.
And a lot of people, you know, have a hard time.
So, put yourself in a place where you could just say, whatever happens, I'm not going to die.
I'm safe.
These drugs are not going to kill me.
It's okay.
Set is much more complicated.
People say, sometimes people say, well, set is your intention or what you want out of the trip.
And so, well, it is partly that.
But set, to my mind, is you.
Set is everything you bring to it your whole life, whatever you've learned, whatever you know, all of those things.
That's the set.
Right, that you bring to it that's interacting in this setting that you very deliberately structured, you know, and then the other two variables here, which are rarely mentioned, but obviously maybe there should be more.
The other two variables set and setting, but then what is the medicine and what is the dose, you know, because those things are going to influence it too.
Yes, and this is what shamanism is useful for.
I mean, in ayahuasca, for example, it's almost always taken in a group, and there's a curandero or a shaman or whatever you want to call that person.
They are the person that are structuring this set and setting, structuring the setting, basically, through songs, through blowing smoke, through maybe other types of audio things, other types of things.
But basically, they are.
Controlling the set, the setting, so that people can relax into it.
And shamans, you know, if they're good, and I hate the word shaman because it's a Siberian word, and the curandaros are not shaman.
Curandaros is probably a better word, or ayahuasca girl.
But these people, men and women, if they're experienced, they know how to do this, you know, and they, in this state, They get very tuned in to everyone in the group, you know, almost telepathically.
I mean, they can tell if you're having a hard time, you know.
They can tell, come over, blow a little wapacho smoke on you, maybe sing a song in front of you, maybe get you calmed down, you know, or get you redirect what you're doing.
That's their job.
That's what shamans do.
So, this idea of taking high.
Amounts of these things.
You know, it's good to have somebody like that or have a therapist.
You know, therapists can do it.
I think psychotherapy, like psychedelic psychotherapy, is evolving more toward what shamans do.
You know, that's integrating some of those methodologies into.
Yeah, you have, then there's like tele-medicine shamans now.
You can literally like order a shaman to come to your house and do this whole thing with you now.
There you go.
Right?
Like, that's a service that people provide now.
Right.
Here's your Uber call.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You just get on your app and order your shaman and you're ready to roll.
Yeah.
This is all right.
This is good.
I mean, I think it's good.
I think it's good to have, you know, what we used to call a sitter.
And sometimes a sitter is enough.
A sitter might not be a shaman, but maybe just a trusted friend.
Yes.
Not even necessarily in the same room.
But, you know, if you get upset, hey, Having a hard time, come in and pat my knee or whatever, you know, and, uh, and, uh, because, you know, you're putting yourself in a unusual state that can be terrifying.
But, but as you point out, there's always something to be learned, you know.
Yes.
I mean, even the terrifying experiences are, uh, sometimes they're the most valuable experiences.
The most valuable.
Definitely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a great thing to use as a tool.
And it's why it's so frustrating that.
Our culture and our society and our government, which is co opted by businesses and pharmaceutical industries and things like this, that pressure our society to outcast these things and label them as these evil substances that will kill you.
And it seems like we're going in the wrong direction.
Well, I think it's changing, though, particularly with psychedelics.
I mean, psychedelics, there's a lot of research has accumulated now to show that they do have these benefits, that if properly used, they can be used.
They're not harmful and they can be very helpful.
So it's kind of shifted the conversation from what it used to be, even, well, this has all been happening since basically since Roland Griffith started working with psilocybin and getting FDA approval and, you know, playing it straight in terms of he was a.
You know, serious neuroscientists and so on.
But now their benefits are being recognized.
But here's the thing any.
I look at psychedelics, they're basically a technology.
Yeah.
Any technology can be misused, you know, and any technology will be misused.
You can be sure of it.
You know, a lot of times there are whole issues about people, you know, Shamans or self-styled shamans that use that to dominate people, to sexual abuse, all of this stuff.
Not that this doesn't happen in therapeutic, so-called therapeutic situations.
This happens in anything.
In anything.
The problem that I think in the conversation about drugs has always been the drugs are identified as the demons.
Drugs are just drugs, they just have the properties that they have.
The moral quality of how you use them comes.
From us, you know, and that's true of any technology.
The choices we make in terms of how to use the technology be it drugs or atomic weaponry or anything it comes down to us.
We're the moral compass, not the technologies neutral.
Disrupting Reality Models00:12:16
But the biggest difference is it doesn't prey on those desires, like it doesn't, other drugs like alcohol or nicotine or these other things.
They all rely on this dopaminergic pathway, and you get addicted to it.
And now you're using it to suppress other things.
You're using it to suppress your, whether it be depression or any other sort of psychological thing you have going on.
Sure.
Where it can just send you down this vicious spiral, this dark spiral.
But with the psychedelics, it's not something that you're going to be, in most cases, addicted to and abusing.
It's something that people are going to use as a tool.
Like, like, Most people, when you talk to them about their DMT experiences or their psychedelic mushroom experiences, you'll ask them, they'll talk about it like they just got done tripping.
But then you'll say, like, when's the last time you did it?
I'll be like, oh, like eight months ago, a year ago.
No, you don't necessarily go back to the well and drink again.
They do not have this reinforcing effect.
And that's exactly right.
These other drugs work through the dopamine.
Dope aminergic pathway, and they reinforce you.
You do it, and you want to do it again, and you want to do it again.
And it's very, very hard to throw that off.
Cocaine is one of those, which we'll talk about.
Yeah, we will talk about that in that sense.
Cocaine is definitely one of those.
And psychedelics can be useful again by letting you step out of your reference frame and look at this addiction.
Process.
Maybe it's alcohol.
Maybe it's cocaine.
Maybe it's heroin.
Maybe it's, you know, tobacco.
All of these things work directly or indirectly through this dopaminergic, aminergic pathway.
So does sex for that matter.
Sex involves anything that you really sort of pushes the pleasure button naturally, you want to repeat it.
Right.
But there's a point at which it becomes unhealthy.
It becomes an obsession.
And so looking at it through the perspective of psychedelics can help you get a handle on that.
It helps you step away from it, it helps you defuse it.
And that's the therapeutic.
Power when it comes to addiction.
It's all about this default mode network.
And people, you know, this default mode network, like we said, it's very useful.
It's where you want to be most of the time.
I don't like the term default mode network.
I call it the reality hallucination.
The reality hallucination.
Our brain synthesizes a model of reality.
You talked about simulations.
Yes.
You know, and this guy with DMT and the simulations.
Yes.
I'm here to tell you.
We are all in a simulation.
Everybody's in a simulation.
Our brains simulate a model of reality.
We live in that model of reality.
We don't know what reality itself is because we're in this model of reality.
And it's defined largely by what doesn't get through.
I mean, I mean, he says like the brain filter hypothesis.
It's exactly the brain filter hypothesis.
The information comes to us through our sensory neural interfaces.
Kind of gets all mixed together inside, you know, and extrudes a model of reality, which is what we experience as ordinary consciousness.
Yeah.
And then you can introduce another pharmacology or something else into it a drug, meditation, another practice.
You can change that model of reality, but you're always trapped in that model of reality.
We can't even say that much about it because we can't even say.
That much about what's outside that model because you take psychedelics and you realize the concept of inside and outside don't make sense.
You know, you're not really separated.
You know, we are all one, right?
That is the psychedelic cliche, but it's true.
You know, we're not separated.
This is like Jung's idea of the archipelago of consciousness, right?
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Where we're all connected under the water, but there's above, we're all little individual islands.
Right.
We appear to be separate.
And I'm a serious Jungian, and so is Terence.
Jung was a deep influence, and I think that's exactly what's going on.
So, this reality hallucination, you know, we can be grateful that we have it because it makes us functional, but it could also go off track.
I mean, it could be dysfunctional.
Well, it's millions of years of.
Of our brains evolving to survive, right?
And to evolve and to push our species into the future.
Yeah.
And when it, you know, when it does get disrupted, it's a problem.
But then we come along and we say, well, you can say, well, my reality hallucination is turning into a bummer.
You know, it's not fun anymore.
And then you can take a psychedelic and you can disrupt it.
You can reprogram it.
And you don't have to worry.
Because the brain and physiological systems in general, they'll tend toward equilibrium.
You know, it's going to fall back together.
It's going to fall back together in most cases.
I mean, some people don't, but very rarely do people not recover from psychedelics.
And even if there's a prolonged.
What do you mean, recover?
You mean like they stay there?
Get back to ordinary reality.
Oh, there's people that stay there?
It's been known, yes.
Oh, my God.
What do they do?
Well, they end up in, you know, they end up in.
Mental hospitals, talking to entities that aren't there.
This is one of my biggest fears.
That's everybody's biggest fear, man.
Is it?
Well, often, but it's very rare, for one thing, even if you have these prolonged states like my La Torreira experience.
I mean, I was as dissociated from reality as anybody could possibly be.
If I was still in that place, People would just say, Oh, poor Dennis, he just never made it back.
You know, could you imagine?
Like, imagine if you were never able to make it back and articulate what it was, right?
I was scared about it, right?
You know, but uh, but it did come back.
And the interesting thing, yeah, hallucinogen persisting perception disorder.
What does it say?
Non psychotic disorder in which a person experiences apparent, lasting, or persistent visual hallucinations or perceptual uh distortions using drugs.
Oh, yeah, there's this guy who, um.
His name's Andrew Callahan or something like that.
He's got a, he's got a, he's a really cool documentary and makes a kind of like run and gun documentaries on YouTube.
And he talks about how he's experienced with, he experimented with, I think it was LSD when he was really young.
I think like in his, when he was like 10 or 11.
And he still sees these visual hallucinations in his, just in his visual field.
Like he's not tripping per se, like as you were.
Right.
But he just has the visual part of it.
That's one of the symptoms of this.
Exactly.
And that's hilarious when you're a kid, right?
When you're young.
Right.
And you don't have the neural mechanisms to reintegrate.
Interesting that you mentioned that.
You should put the McKenna Academy website back up because we are having a seminar.
We're having a virtual seminar in April called on this very topic.
It's called Can You Go Back, Go to Programs?
So, this is a virtual seminar that we're doing in April.
And this is going to be talking about this, you know, psychedelics and psychosis and spiritual emergencies.
If you scroll down, you can see the people doing it.
And it's going to be a very interesting one day virtual conference.
One of our board members, Dr. Ranji Vorghese, who is a psychiatrist, he has a ketamine clinic, but he's one of our board members.
He's going to talk, and then these other people are going to talk, including a couple of curanderos.
And all of this was sort of triggered by Lee Kaiser there on the right.
Lee's a good friend of mine, and he's done a lot of medicine work with ayahuasca in the Sacred Valley.
He's been interested for For years.
And he has had several of these psychotic interactions as a result of ayahuasca.
Psychotic?
What do you mean you're talking about?
Psychotic.
So, we just say prolonged dissociations from reality, whatever they are.
Psychosis is such a hard word.
But shall we say, you know, he's had a couple of these, and so a lot of it he's going to share his experience.
And the indigenous people, Enrique and Loiver, were involved in helping him get straightened out, get back to reality.
Using their traditional techniques, and they were far more effective than psychiatrists.
I had a friend once tell me that he used to take mushrooms all the time.
This was a long time ago.
And he'd say when he was tripping too hard, he would just do cocaine and it would pull him right out of it.
That's possible.
That's possible.
That's rather surprising, but it's possible because cocaine is going to focus you.
I wouldn't reach for cocaine as necessarily the antidote to psychedelics, but Maybe it brought him back to a point where he could, you know, sort of come out of that.
When it comes to like the drugs that are legal and illegal and what are banned and what we're not allowed to use and what are only approved for like certain therapies, right?
It's just like, it's, it's what they don't, what people don't realize is we are literally walking bags of drugs.
Good point.
That we're never in a, in a, we're never in one state.
Our state is constantly evolving depending on what chemicals are taking over and the balance.
It's just a constant balance of drugs and chemicals in our bodies.
That's right.
And it's so fun to experiment and offset that balance a little bit and see how that affects us positively or negatively.
That's exactly it.
Yes.
You touched on a point that I often make.
We're made of drugs.
That's the thing.
We are biochemical engines that work on drugs, you know, neurotransmitters, enzymes, hormones, all of this.
We're biochemical engines.
Yes.
Maybe more than that.
I'd like to think that we've, you know, there's a spiritual aspect, but, you know, the functioning body is a biochemical machine that runs on drugs, and this is why drugs have their effect.
Tryptophan Enzymes in Plants00:05:50
If you, you know, DMT, for example, we know that it occurs in the brain, you know, at rather high levels, you know, and, and, you know, I mean, it's there.
It's actually a neurotransmitter.
And there's, you know, recent work has shown, originally it was sort of the Focus was all about the pineal gland.
Yes.
And that data is not so valid anymore.
The pineal gland does make DMT, but not enough to have an effect.
But there are whole new neurotransmitter systems that have been identified for which DMT is basically the neurotransmitter at levels comparable to serotonin.
DMT is in pretty much everything, right?
In fact, DMT is in everything.
It's true.
And you know why it's in everything?
It's because DMT is the simplest, molecularly, the simplest psychedelic.
And it comes from tryptophan.
Tryptophan is an amino acid, one of the 20 that makes up proteins, right?
So tryptophan is in every living thing, every living thing, because it's one of the 20.
And there are enzymes.
DMT is two steps from tryptophan.
There are enzymes that take off the carboxyl group.
Tryptophan is an amino acid.
Decarboxylases, this class of enzymes called decarboxylases, remove the acid group and then you get amines.
So you get tryptophan, you remove the carboxyl group, you get tryptamine.
You stick two methyl groups on that, another enzyme comes along called N-methyltransferase.
I love biochemistry because the name of enzymes describes what they do.
Right, and methyltransferase it sticks methyl groups on things, CH3 groups on things.
So, two steps from tryptophan, you get DMT, and then from that, you get all these variations bufotinine, uh, 5-methoxy DMT, psilocybin.
You get this whole tryptamine family, of most of which are psychoactive.
But DMT is the primary uh hallucinogenic or psychedelic.
Tryptamine, and it's the simplest one.
It's not orally active.
And actually, you could eat plants that contain DMT, and people do.
It's the part of some people's diet, but because they're not taking MAO inhibitors, they never suspect they're taking a hallucinogen.
For example, DMT occurs in oranges and lemons and things like that at low levels, but it's there.
DMT.
I think there are thousands of plants that contain DMT.
It's not rare at all.
Not all plants express DMT in great quantities, but it's there.
And then some do actually produce significant amounts of it, you know, like acacias, for example.
Acacia, which is primarily, I mean, acacia is about 1,200 genera or 1,200 species.
All through Africa, mostly Australia, concentrated.
Some of the most potent sources of DMT and other tryptamines are found in acacias, which ironically happens to be, they're known as, generically, they're known as wattles in Australia.
The wattle is the national tree of Australia.
Interesting.
There's no record that Aborigines use these things, but they have been there.
And My theory is that there's probably trace amounts of DMT in all plants, you know, because of these enzymes, decarboxylases and N-methyltransferases, they're pretty much involved in cellular processes at all levels.
So nobody's going to do this and nobody's going to fund it, but I'll bet if you went out and just started picking plants at random and analyzing them for DMT, you would find trace amounts of DMT.
Mm-hmm.
and in some cases large amounts and those are the ones that have become utilized like the chacruna, psychotria which is the admixture plant for ayahuasca or these anodinanthra snuffs that are the seeds are made into snuff or the ukuhe that we were talking about, the varolas.
They contain large amounts of DMT and indigenous people have, you know, they're very clever.
They want to get high just like everybody does.
But they become very clever at identifying these plants and learning how to prepare them.
Yeah, I mean, and even through history, imagine how much drugs people were doing through antiquity, right?
Like they didn't have the cultural boundaries and guidelines and sanctions, if you want to put it that way, around society, right?
Like they didn't have to follow these norms, they didn't have to fit into these norms.
They were probably just roaming around trying to have sex and get high and eat.
Fossil Evidence for Ancient Psychedelics00:04:56
Pretty much.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, this goes back to the whole stoned ape theory.
You know, that's another rabbit hole we could go down.
Yeah.
You know, yeah.
But, That's a, I think that's one of my favorite theories that Terrence came up with.
It makes a lot, it's much more easy to comprehend than Time Wave Zero.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
And it may, it's another one of these theories.
It's, yeah, it's circumstantial evidence, but it's probably true.
Terrence actually didn't come up with it.
It was my idea.
Oh, it was your idea.
But, you know, we shared ideas.
I mean, he wrote the book Food of the Gods, which, And he, you know, it's a great book.
If you haven't read it, it's definitely worth reading.
And it is this idea about, but I have elaborated on that idea.
And what's interesting, he suggests that mushrooms were used quite by ancient civilizations.
And I fear my theory is that mushrooms were probably the oldest psychedelic that humans have ever used and may have been used as long ago as two million years and may have had a lot to do with the evolution of our neural structures and our consciousness.
Don't look at me like that.
This is not such a crazy idea.
There's inferential evidence for this.
So we know that hominid.
Populations evolved in Africa around two million years ago.
And although the fossil record is, you know, incomplete, obviously, but we have a pretty good idea of the lineage, you know.
There are fossils of starting with the first true hominids, Homo habilis, was probably the first hominid.
And then there were different lineages that.
Appeared.
Homo erectus was part of this.
There wasn't a single lineage.
There was actually various species in this environment that were interacting and interbreeding with each other.
And eventually some emerged as the dominant species.
So Homo habilis, Homo erectus, eventually Homo sapiens.
And over about two million years, the size and complexity of the human brain.
Expanded, basically tripled inside.
Homo habilis, the brain of Homo habilis was small by comparison, about 500 cubic centimeters.
Homo erectus, somewhat larger, maybe a thousand cubic centimeters.
There you go.
Oh, yeah.
We went over this with.
Was it Gallimore?
No, we went over this with Michael Masters.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, that could be.
I've got another chart.
He's an anthropologist.
Yeah, this is.
Yeah, this is a good one.
So, Homo sapiens has the largest brain.
Actually, Neanderthals have a slightly bigger brain.
Right.
But they're also much bigger people than Homo sapiens.
So, brain to body mass, that's about 1500 centimeters.
And so, the fossil evidence is there.
What's also there is that in this environment, there's fossil evidence that there were cattle.
These have been found.
These people were living with cattle.
They were hunting cattle.
They were probably eating cattle.
If you got cattle, you've got cattle.
Mushrooms.
Would it have to be cattle?
Could it be any other sort of megafauna?
It could have been.
It could have been.
I mean, yeah.
Or mimetic.
It doesn't have to be cow shit that mushroom grows on.
Right.
But we do know from fossil evidence that the ancestors of the modern cow was in this environment at that time.
And we know from paleoclimatology that it was a wet environment.
The Sahara is a desert now, right?
But at that time, From paleoclimatological data, we know that it was a wet, there were seasonal rains at least, it was lake country, it was savanna, so there was megafauna of all sorts, and it was a humid, wet environment.
Evolutionary Time Machines00:12:03
There had to be mushrooms there.
There just had to be mushrooms there because Psilosopy cumensis, if you go to any similar tropical environment these days, wet with Cebu cattle or similar cows, You're going to find these mushrooms.
I mean, they're just there.
They follow the cows.
And so, in this, and these mushrooms in the environment, they're not difficult to spot.
I mean, they're big, they're robust.
So, if you're a hungry hominid looking for something to eat, sooner or later, sooner rather than later, you're going to sample these.
And then who knows what that effect would be.
But then that's where, you know, these long term effects of psilocybin on the neural.
Neural reorganization can begin to kick in, right?
But what propagates that over evolutionary time?
Well, this process, which is known as epigenetics.
Yes.
Epigenetics is a mechanism where, effectively, for acquired characteristics being propagated over generations.
And trauma as well, right?
Trauma, yes.
All these kinds of things, other kinds of drugs, other kinds of not so good drugs will also propagate.
So, Lamarckianism used to be a theory of evolution that was kind of debunked, you know, that was like, well, giraffes have long necks because they're always straining to get the leaves at the top of trees, right?
So, eventually they got long necked.
There was something too that it didn't, eventually they got long necked.
And there wasn't maybe a An environmental influence, a selection.
The tallest giraffe's got the leaves.
That's how natural selection works.
But this happens on a more biochemical level, and it has to do with the unwrapping of segments of DNA that are bound up in these bodies called histones in the chromosomes.
And under the effect of environmental influences, these inaccessible segments of DNA can be unbound and expressed.
And if the neural changes are related to that, the activation of these segments of DNA, then that can actually be propagated across generations.
Wow.
So that's a plausible mechanism for the stone ape theory.
It's not so crazy.
It's like.
Of course.
What else can you think of that would lead to this complexification of the brain other than the fact that hominids in this environment were extremely, you know, were exposed to all sorts of environmental pressures?
But I don't think learning to throw spears better was necessarily enough.
But this was something that was part of their diet and it could have this effect over, you know, over evolutionary time.
I mean, it's Makes perfect sense.
It's one of these theories.
It's a plausible theory.
How do you prove it?
Is there a way to disprove it?
There's no way to disprove it that I can see.
Maybe if we had one of those time machines that this guy is going to invent for us, I would love that.
I told you I was totally obsessed with time travel.
I'd go back immediately to the Serengetic Plane a couple of years ago and see what the hell was going on.
Have you ever heard of the extra-tempestrial model?
No.
There's a biological anthropologist named Michael Masters who came up with this theory.
And he got into anthropology because he was obsessed with UFOs when he was a kid and the little gray aliens.
And basically what that extra-tempestrial model is, is that what we know of as the little gray alien, figures that we see with the small, skinny, spindly bodies and the big heads are not creatures from another planet or another solar system.
They are future humans.
And there's this phenomena in evolution called pedomorphism.
And essentially what pedomorphism is, is that if you go back in time and you look at the offspring of primates, The offspring of primates look like their future descendants.
So, if you pull up a picture of a young primate, it's kind of like, look, right there.
It's got a head more proportionate to the body of us today.
And if you look at a fully grown adult primate, it's got that head with a forward protruding jaw, a slanted forehead, and a much bigger body.
Neoteny, it's called also.
Yes.
Yeah.
Exactly.
So like if you look at our children today, they look like what these little gray aliens kind of look, they look more like what these little gray aliens look like that we see in, in the movies, right?
Or in, if you look at like John Max, you know, all the, the studies that he did on people with abduction experiences.
So his idea is that those are humans that have evolved hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years into the future.
And what they're doing is they're coming back in these time machines.
These flying saucers are essentially time machines coming back to repopulate future humanity in the future.
So if there was some sort of big cataclysmic event in the future, like a global thermonuclear war or some sort of climate catastrophe or a cosmic catastrophe that happened, and there was a bottleneck in humanity and civilization, they would want to come back to sort of extract DNA from their ancestors to repopulate themselves back into the future, which would explain John Max.
Professor John Mack from Harvard, he was the guy, I'm sure you're familiar with him, famous psychiatrist.
Yeah.
When there was a vast majority of those cases involved the extraction of eggs and sperm from these people that were experiencing these alien abductions, whether that was happening in reality or whether that was happening in their heads, we don't know.
But he said that would explain, that's a hypothesis for that.
And another way he uses to bolster this idea is that Why would like, like all of these alien and experience sightings, these UFO sightings around the world?
Have ties to these Communications of save the planet, be aware of technology.
Technology can destroy you, So why would a future civilization, or why would a civilization from a completely separate galaxy care about preserving us, like what?
What stakes would they have in our planet?
Well, if we were their ancestors, if we were their ancestors, they would care.
They would, they would have a stake in this planet and they would want to protect humanity and protect the planet, right?
Because it would have directly affected them in hundreds of thousands of years into the future.
So, and then that combined with the fact that we are so rare as bipedal hominids that have figured out technology to the point where we can escape the planet.
Right.
Like out of all of the catalog species, I think there's over 2 million catalog species on, on, on, On Earth.
And out of that 2 million, 20 of them are hominids.
Right.
Out of the 20 hominids, there's one of them which figured out technology.
And they invented language.
Invented language.
So, all of that.
So, us, out of all the species on this Earth that's bursting with life and biology, we're 0.0001% of the living creatures on this Earth.
So, think about just how rare we are on this one planet that's in this Goldilocks zone that is filled with life.
And all of the other Goldilocks planets that we found are, they don't have the same gravity.
They don't have the same atmosphere.
It is almost, it is pretty much impossible that any sort of life would evolve to be upright bipedal hominids.
You know, most of those worlds are water worlds.
Yeah.
So they would look so much different.
Likely.
I mean, it's a good general body structure.
You know, it's useful for things, you know, but there, you can imagine many other.
Body structures that might work well.
This is a fascinating idea because uh if, if my inference is correct, then you know.
So these are future aliens that are coming back to get dna.
The implication is that at some point there is a cataclysm that wipes us out, but they've already got the dna, so then they can come back and repopulate the earth.
Yeah, they can go back to repopulate the future.
I feel so much better already, Right.
And there's so many there's so many accounts of of these UFO sightings near nuclear sites.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know disabling nuclear nuclear launch sites and stuff like that.
After listening to this podcast that you did about time travel, the gentleman's name was Ronald Mallett.
After I listened to that, I thought this is actually the most plausible explanation.
I can almost buy this because he made it clear how, you know, what we understand of physics is actually possible if you have the command of these incredible sources of energy and all that.
Right.
It is actually possible to travel into the past.
This does not violate what we understand about time.
I always assume that, of course, future time travel is no problem, a given.
The faster you go, time slows down and decades go by.
Yeah, there was a study getting into what the atomic clock was.
That's the tricky part.
And he talked about a plausible way that this could happen.
I need one of those machines.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah.
And there's the, there's the, we were trying to build one, but, you know, it kind of didn't work.
Right.
And there's the time dilation, which happens, which is the paradox of like if we wanted to send astronauts to travel to the edge of the galaxy, it would take 22 years in rocket time, which would be like a million years of Earth time, right?
So by the time they get halfway there in 10 years or whatever, there would have been 500,000 years on Earth.
They could have sent somebody up in five minutes that would be passing them with their belly still full of breakfast.
Yes.
You know what I mean?
Like, well, we wasted our whole lives to do 10 years of our lives when, you know, Earth has evolved.
You basically have to say goodbye to everyone you know on Earth because time would be passing so much faster on Earth.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
Nineteenth Century Spirit Medicines00:16:01
Yeah.
So these are mind boggling concepts.
Yeah.
But let's take it down to Earth.
Let's talk about plants.
Let's talk about.
Back to draw.
Have you, I'm sure you've read The Road to Eleusis.
With Carl Ruck and Albert Hoffman and Gordon Wasson.
Right.
And Brian Murorescu's book that.
The Immortality Key, that's the new one.
Right.
Based off that.
Kind of comes next.
Yeah, I'm familiar with all that.
Yeah.
And it's just these cultures in ancient times and the Greeks and the Romans were just doing.
There's another book called The Chemical Muse, which is really good, which was a book written all about.
Galen.
Ah, yes.
Galen.
Second century physician who was Marcus Aurelius's doctor.
Right, right.
And he was an amazing, like a huge mind of antiquity and philosophical mastermind and a medicine.
You know, he was a savant, right?
He created all these concoctions and medicines and drugs.
And he even wrote about like how much opium, Marcus Aurelius, he had to give Marcus Aurelius so much opium.
He was getting addicted to opium and he kept.
When he was writing, he would always be kind of complaining about how he kept having to up the dose for Marcus Aurelius because he was so just addicted to opium.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, basically that book, The Chemical Muse, just talks about how drugs were ubiquitous in antiquity.
They were just everywhere.
People were constantly doing drugs because, you know, there was constant death and plague and famine everywhere.
People were starving.
People were dying of diseases and people were getting injured.
You know, dying, getting injured in war and battle.
So, drugs were just a part of everyday life, and they didn't distinguish the difference between medicinal and recreational.
Right, right.
And really, there isn't.
I mean, many of these drugs were psychoactive.
Very interesting that you should mention Galen, because Galen was one of the first more or less modern pharmacologists.
In some ways, he was a phytochemist and he was a pharmacologist and he was mucking around with all these formulations, combinations of drugs and extractions and preparations.
This is very interesting that you bring this up.
Because this actually segues very smoothly into the topic that I am going to talk about at this COCA conference that we're organizing.
I've been thinking, you know, what am I going to talk about?
And I'm not an expert on COCA or cocaine or any of that, other than, you know, I'm certainly not like some of the people that have spent their whole lives talking about it.
So I've been wondering, what am I going to talk about?
And what I'm going to talk about at the COCA conference is, and this is just still being formulated in my mind, I'm going to talk about how I'm going to talk about the re emergence of spirit into medicine, right?
Back in the day when Galen and Paracelsus and all these people, Paracelsus was another amazing figure, you know, very modern ideas about pharmacology and drugs.
He was the One that articulated the idea that dose was important.
He said, There is no drug that is not a poison.
It's the dose that makes the difference.
So, all these people were making extracts and doing different things, and they were pulling extracts out and that sort of thing.
In fact, early distillation technology of fermented fruits and that sort of thing, you could ferment fruits and get wine and beers, but then there were people trying to concentrate those using. primitive distillation techniques.
And they were, their understanding of these medicines, it was not about chemistry.
It was that they were infused with a certain spiritual essence, in fact, an intelligence, in fact, spirits.
And the word spirits, we talked about distilled spirits.
That goes back to an age when they were actually trying to take the spirit out of the plant and concentrate it.
You know, that's what the concept was distilled spirits, right?
So there was, you know, people have always mucked around with plants and tried different combinations and so on.
And you can look at this at the history of the more recent history of ayahuasca if you look at some of our ESPD talks.
And dose, it's interesting you bring up dose too because what you say about poisons, because the.
They also took poisons like viper venoms.
Yeah, they took all kinds of poisons.
And these venoms are now being recognized as, you know, a tiny amount.
They're therapeutic.
So there was a.
So they were doing this, and there was alchemy, and there was all this herbalism.
And the plants were understood to be effectively intelligent entities that people were in partner with.
They had spirit.
They were.
The idea of a life force, you know.
But then there was an important, I don't know if we'd call it a milestone, but at the beginning of the 19th century, there was a German pharmacist named Sertner who isolated morphine from the opium poppy for the first time, morphine in a pure form,
isolated morphine.
And morphine had most of the properties of opium.
It was an analgesic.
You could get addicted on it.
It caused euphoria and so on.
But it was clearly not alive, right?
It was not a spirit.
It was a crystal, you know.
And so that led to, in some ways, that was the first step.
It was an alkaloid, right?
Like so many of these medicines are.
And because it's an alkaloid, it could be easily.
Isolated in a pure form, using techniques we think of as pretty primitive chemistry, but you could isolate it and crystallize it.
The first time that was done, it was done with morphine.
It had all the properties.
It was the beginning of this shift in understanding.
During the 19th century, in my lectures, I sometimes say the 19th century was the age of alkaloids.
It was the first beginning of modern phytotherapy, pharmacotherapy, based on pure compounds.
And a whole slew of alkaloids were isolated in the 19th century.
Morphine, scopolamine, hyocyanine, cocaine around the middle of the 19th century, theobromine, caffeine, all of these alkaloids were isolated, culminating with the isolation of mescaline in a pure form.
At the end of the 19th century, in 1903, or maybe it was 1899, I'm not sure, but Arthur Hepter, the chemist Arthur Hepter, for whom the Hepter Research Institute is named, isolated mescaline from peyote.
So the concept that always before therapy with plants was understood to be a symbiosis, a symbiotic alliance between these plants that were intelligent entities that had their own agency.
Obviously, had active compounds, but were understood to be in some ways very much participating in this spiritual process of healing that we call medicine or we call herbalism.
But the isolation of these pure compounds was the beginning of the concept of spirit became ostracized from medicine.
The idea that, no, there's no life force.
Vital force in these things.
It's just chemistry.
It's just pharmacology, you know, and so are we.
We are biochemical engines, just biochemical machines.
And if you apply the right molecular monkey wrench, you know, in the form of a molecule, you can fix the problem, you know, you can fix the machine.
So the idea that spirit was part of medicine, was part of healing.
Was suppressed as medicine evolved into what it is now, you know, and it very much de emphasizes spirituality.
It's very much about pharmacotherapy.
We have chemicals.
You have sicknesses.
They affect these different processes.
There's no invocation of any spiritual aspect to it.
It's all seen as very mechanistic.
But then, so it goes on.
And as we know, the American Medical Association and these other institutions went out of the way to suppress herbalism.
And herbalists and to dismiss the whole thing as quackery, even though there's a vast body of scientific literature that shows that herbal preparations do have medicinal properties.
But so called mainstream medicine, pharmaceutical medicine, biomedicine, as I like to characterize it, they don't accept that, or they're skeptical, definitely.
They don't accept it.
For one thing, you can't patent natural products, and it's not as easy.
It's in their interest to suppress this and to sort of, you know, and to say it's all quackery and all these alchemists and witches.
You know, witches were often midwives, basically, and they were people that understood women's health and the use of plants for women's health, for inducing labor, for inducing abortion, which was a big one, for, you know, inducing lactation, for doing all the things that.
You know, are peculiar to women's physiology.
That body of knowledge was the, you know, was the province of the women.
The women had this wisdom.
It was women's wisdom.
And so medicine got away from spirit.
Medicine exorcised spirit.
Yes.
You know, and said it's all just mechanical.
And then so that went on and it went on from the 19th century into the 20th century.
And then along came psychedelics.
I mean, they've always been there, they've always been used, but along came psychedelics as potential medicines and this sort of psychedelic renaissance and the reintroduction of psychedelics into medicine, into medical therapies.
The reason medicine is so uncomfortable with psychedelics is that they are medicines for the spirit, effectively.
They have to admit that a spirit exists if they're going to use psychedelics.
And this is why, you know, I mean, they're grudgingly beginning to use psychedelics in medicine.
But a lot of people are uncomfortable with this for this very reason.
In fact, there's a whole group of medicinal chemists and drug developers who are trying to take psychedelic molecules and engineer the trip out of the molecule, right?
So they're trying to create.
Non psychedelic psychedelics, which by definition they can't be because psychedelic means mind manifesting, right?
You have to admit that the mind exists.
The mind and the spirit may be the same thing.
So these non psychedelic psychedelics, the thinking is well, if you just tweak these receptors and you tweak these changes that the psychedelic produces without ever having an experience, it'll be fine.
You don't have to suffer all that terror, all that trauma, all that.
The catharsis that you have to go through when you take a psychedelic therapy session.
You'll never know anything happened.
You'll just suddenly feel better.
This is bullshit, in my opinion.
I think that you cannot dissociate the psychedelic experience from the therapeutic effect.
I think these people trying to develop non-psychedelic psychedelics are seriously deluded and misguided.
And so psychedelics have come back into medicine and it's changing the perception because in order to develop therapies that are appropriate to use psychedelics, they have to change their models, right?
And drug development, drug approval, it's all so far been based on the placebo-controlled double-blind clinical trial.
That's the structure, right?
And you know how that works.
So you have a placebo, you have an active drug, the doctor and the patients don't know who's getting what until the blind is removed, and is there an effect?
Or is it just placebo?
Is there a real effect?
And this is the approach they take to this thing.
When it comes to psychedelics, you cannot really apply that method.
You can't develop a placebo controlled method.
How do you develop a placebo for something like psilocybin?
Right.
I mean, the joke, the cartoon that you may have seen is they're in a clinic and half the people are dancing around and.
Rolling on the floor, and there's a couple sitting on the couch, and he looks at the woman and he says, I'm guessing we got the placebo.
Yeah.
Right.
Yes.
And this is true.
Yeah.
And, you know, and this is important because if they insist on developing these drugs using these outmoded methodologies, Based on placebo control and clinical trials, they can't do it.
Coca Cartels and Alternative Markets00:17:04
MDMA went down in flames for exactly this reason, right?
The company that MAPS formed, Lycos, to bring MDMA to the market, you know, had a, and they're like $50 million involved in this, and they did clinical trials with MDMA for trauma, and it was very effective.
But It was there was an FDA review board.
Most of the people on the board were not really clinicians, none of them had any experience themselves with any of these psychedelics andor any really clinical trials.
And they said, Well, it wasn't a well controlled study, you know, because you didn't have the right placebos, you didn't design it correctly.
And so, we don't accept these effects, we don't accept these results.
And as a result, We don't approve MDMA, you know, and the psychiatric community is saying, but wait a minute, this showed profound effectiveness for treating PTSD.
You can't just dismiss this, you know, and the FDA is saying, well, actually, we can dismiss it, you know, and we hold the keys, and you guys didn't meet the criteria for design of the study that we insist on because it wasn't a placebo controlled study.
And, uh, And so nobody knows where that's going.
I mean, they said basically design a better study or a different study.
But, you know, they, I mean, it's created a big problem.
And I don't know where it's going to go in terms of the advancement of psychedelic therapies in biomedicine.
But, you know, I mean, it may be that psychedelics will not go anywhere because of this, because of this insistence, because the whole pharmaceutical industrial complex is so rigid in the way that they.
You know, regard this.
So we'll see.
Anyway, to bring it back to coca again, what I wanted to, the point I want to make when I deliver my talk is that coca is a good example of, you know, cocaine was isolated from coca.
And it's one of these pure compounds that has met many of the properties, but not all of the properties of coca.
But that's been the fixation.
And it's, Caused so much damage on the geopolitically, socially, everything else.
I mean, not only is it a toxic, harmful drug, but the political impact it's had has been tremendous, tremendously negative.
The drug cartels who control the production and distribution of cocaine basically, these indigenous families or families of farmers that.
Cultivate coca, they just go and they just say, Well, you know, you're working for us now.
You know, they don't want to work for them, but they just say, We're working, you're working for us.
And if you don't work for us, we'll kill you.
You know, and then they deal, kill a few of them to keep, to set an example.
And then the whole cartel thing controls the production of cocaine.
If cocaine were legalized, it would be worthless.
You know, it would not be, cocaine is not an expensive compound.
You can make it for pennies.
You could extract it if it were not a controlled substance.
It would not be a valuable compound.
I mean, if you had, if caffeine were declared illegal tomorrow, you'd see many of the same things go on.
Well, not only that, but it wouldn't be killing people because it would have to be regulated and made safely.
Exactly.
You wouldn't have all these people dying from cocaine laced with other things like fentanyl.
It would be much safer.
And you could go to a pharmacy and you could buy it.
If you wanted to use cocaine, you could just buy it.
People could use it.
It wouldn't have the glamour.
It wouldn't be the romantic thing that it is, but it wouldn't have the glamour.
And these people would just be sort of viewed as kind of pathetic drug addicts.
But okay, if they like it, let them buy it a few bucks and let the rest of the world use coca.
And coca is a wonderful plant.
It has many benefits besides.
Most of the coca preparations that are used have very small amounts of cocaine.
It's a mild stimulant.
It's about as toxic as green tea, you know, and it's used.
It has very good nutritional properties.
It's the main remedy for altitude sickness in the Andes, those sorts of sicknesses.
There's one group that will be presenting at this coca conference on trying to develop.
Coca extract as a treatment for ADHD, for which it's very effective.
Yeah, because the FDA does allow botanical drugs to be developed.
There is a protocol for that.
So they're trying to apply FDA botanical frameworks for developing a coca extract, which doesn't contain cocaine or contains only traces of cocaine for ADHD and many other things coca is useful for.
And all sorts of products are being developed from you know, non cocaine coca derived products.
And that's a lot of what this conference is about to talk about this to neutralize the cartels, basically create alternative markets for coca so these farmers will have a place to sell their coca.
Companies can develop these products.
And if the prohibition of cocaine can be, Ended, then the cartels will not have a market and their whole grip on this whole thing geopolitically will fall apart.
So that's what this conference is bringing together medicine, botanists who have studied coca for many years, a whole bunch of regulatory people involved in drug policy in Europe, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, which is where they're produced.
Like I said, the vice president of Bolivia, who's been a strong public advocate for coca, not cocaine, coca for many years, is going to be there, and other high profile people, people from the UN, World Health Organization, and so on.
So we have been able to attract a pretty high level bunch of folks, bunch of experts, and we're going to have this.
This three day conference, have this active dialogue go on.
Well, the problem with this is not just the cartels, it's the United States military industrial complex propping up the cartels and quite literally using them to fund covert ops forever.
Absolutely.
Right.
All of that and the people that, you know, fundamentally at base, it's the people who consume cocaine, you know.
If you like cocaine, that's fine.
You know, I mean, sure, it's a pleasurable drug, but you should be able to go to the pharmacy and buy it.
Well, they use it for like brain surgery, right?
Like neurosurgeons use cocaine.
They do.
They use it as an anesthetic for certain kinds of surgery, like nasal surgery and that sort of thing.
But the thing is, because it's under the control of the cartels, Ethically, there's real problems with using cocaine.
It's similar to blood diamonds.
I mean, it's essentially the same thing.
Blood diamonds are available to the world.
How many children get enslaved?
The environmental impact is tremendous.
It's very much the same.
The world cocaine markets are based on slavery, murder, environmental destruction.
I mean, the processing of cocaine destroys trevor Burrus, Jr.: The processing of iPhones.
What's that?
Just like the processing of iPhones.
Yeah, well, exactly.
How they get the materials for iPhones.
Right, right.
Quite so.
Quite so.
Make a good point, but I'm not crusading for iPhones.
Right.
So the idea is if we can have this conference and shift the conversation and point out the ethical conundrum of consuming cocaine and the problems that create, because that just ripples through governments.
Governments are corrupt.
Institutions are corrupt.
People are corrupt.
And the And basically, the poor farmers who are at the base of all this are exploited.
They don't have a lot of choice.
So, the idea with this conference is we want to have this conversation and see if we can begin to move the regulatory frameworks toward more rational,
toward the liberation of non-cocaine coca products, as well as the change in the In the regulation of cocaine toward something that can be available, but is not, I mean, it's the fact that it's illegal is what gives cocaine value.
You know, that's why it's worth millions of dollars.
It's not that it's an expensive compound to make, it's just because it's illegal.
Now, is it illegal for me to have a coca plant in my possession?
Technically, yes.
That's the first thing that needs to change.
In the drug regulatory laws, very few plants are prohibited as plants.
Coca happens to be one of those that are.
Cannabis is another.
Peyote is another.
And that's because the laws were formulated, number one, in a way that was the people formulating the laws.
This all happened when the UN Convention on Narcotic Drugs was formed at the beginning of.
At the end of the 60s.
And certain plants were designated to be illegal as plants, and then the rest of it was mostly as chemicals.
So the first thing that needs to happen is globally, the prohibition of coca as a plant needs to end.
I mean, anyone should be able to grow coca like cannabis is now.
Cannabis is pretty much, even though cannabis is still.
Prohibited some place, but it's increasingly become legal right.
Lots of people here in Florida are growing coca.
People in Hawaii are growing coca.
It's people in Florida are growing coca.
People in Florida are growing coca.
Growing coca yeah, oh hell.
Yes, of course it's easy to grow.
Yeah well, I mean it's it also like i've seen the documentaries I I see it's.
It's a quite the laborious process to manufacture cocaine, like you see them taking all the leaves and then like crushing them up and mixing them with Gasoline and all these other things in these big vats.
Right.
I mean, like, that's far from the actual leaf.
And, like, oh, yeah.
If you wanted to take the coca leaf, like, what would be the process of doing it?
Is it similar to, like, cotton in Africa?
It's similar to cotton.
It's used very much that way.
It's chewed or, you know, and then there's this material called mombe, which is a powdered form of it.
Okay.
And people take that and, you know, you basically make a quid or you put it.
between your gum and your cheek and then you just suck on it.
Right.
And you get this effect.
And they make teas out of it.
They make food out of it.
They make all kinds of things.
And they're going to be talking about all this.
You should put the webpage up there so people can look at it.
Where is the conference going to happen?
It's going to happen in the Sacred Valley of Peru at this tourist retreat center that I've often gone to.
It's a lovely place.
And the Sacred Valley is kind of the center of the Andean coca traditions.
Coca is.
At the center of the Andean, both medicine and cosmo vision, if you will.
I mean, to them, it's a sacred plant.
And so it's appropriate to do it there.
And people can look at this website and look at the bios and what people will be presenting.
Yeah, we'll put the link in the description for people who want to read more about it.
I mean, it's not that we're the only policy discussion going on on this.
Other people are beginning to wake up.
There have been meetings at the World Health Organization and the UN recently.
Wade Davis is one of the chief organizers in this conference.
And because of who he is, he's very recognized as a public advocate for more sane regulation of coca.
So he's been at a couple of meetings at the UN and World Health Organization.
And these Global organizations are beginning to wake up to the fact that, well, what we've got now is not working.
The global prohibition of coca is creating more problems than anything else because of the cartels.
And the more effort goes into prohibiting coca and controlling the supply, this all benefits the cartels.
The last people that want to see coca legalized are the cartels.
Right.
because their business goes down the tubes if that's done and they're done.
So where and why am I doing this?
Well, I am doing it because I'm an ethnobotanist and I'm interested basically in useful plants.
You know, that's what it comes down to.
And coca is a plant that has been demonized and stigmatized because it's the source of cocaine.
for so long.
So people say, well, it is this evil plant.
No, again, it comes back to, you know, human behavior.
The people that are extracting cocaine and marketing it and putting people into slavery and all that to get cocaine, they're the evil ones.
Cocaine is simply a plant, you know, and it's a very good plant.
It's a beneficial plant.
So I'm not an expert on cocaine.
I'm not, My expertise in ethnobotany is basically ayahuasca.
That's what I've done most of my work on.
But I'm interested generally in preserving biodiversity, preserving indigenous knowledge about plants, and preserving the plants.
Herbarium and Indigenous Knowledge00:14:41
And so I'm a good friend of Wade's.
And so when we together came up with this idea about doing this forum, this symposium, and I'm all in because.
If we get a global notice for this, then people who are in positions, influential positions, can change, can make change.
And that's why we're, you know, again, people can, if they want to support this, they can donate to the Academy.
They can attend if they're interested.
We have about 10 slots available for guests.
Because of the technical limitations, we won't be able to live stream this from there.
But all the talks will be recorded and we'll upload them every night after each session.
We'll upload them to the website and they'll just be available for people to look at when they want to.
So that's our latest obsession, I guess you could say.
That's amazing.
Yeah.
No, that's interesting.
I saw that also you emailed me a paper recently that was in PubMed.
It was a scientific paper that just recently, was it recent about coca?
Yes.
What was the study that was going on there?
Steve, I emailed that to you earlier.
You'll have that.
Yeah, I emailed it, and it's good that you raised it.
I emailed it.
It was a small study because there's this big problem, obviously, with cocaine addiction, right?
And a lot of people are addicted to cocaine, and it's very hard to.
But turns out the best remedy for cocaine addiction is coca.
Huh.
And it makes sense, right?
It's sort of like methadone is to heroin, you know.
I mean, it's a different compound, but a simple extract of coca, people can take, chew it, or take it as mambe or even a tea.
This is mostly going on in South America because, of course, a lot of cocaine addiction associated with producing coca.
A lot of people are addicted to what's called pasta, which is the semi pure form of coca.
Effectively, it's crack cocaine, it's a smokable form halfway through the purification process.
So, they have a huge problem with cocaine addiction in Bolivia and Peru and these producing countries.
And there are some doctors there that are conducting research, and it turns out that coca, unrefined coca, is a good remedy for cocaine addiction.
Oh, wow.
That's amazing.
Similar to the way that nicotine patches and nicotine chewing gum can help people get off cigarettes.
Same thing, exactly.
Same idea.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Yeah.
Okay.
Perfect.
Yeah, yeah.
I'll link this below so people could.
Conference is happening in just a few weeks in the beginning of February.
Yeah, the conference will be February 3 to 7th.
And then following that, actually in Cusco, we're going to have a mini event at the end of the conference.
People are going to go to Cusco.
This is mainly for the conference attendees.
We're going to show an amazing film about coca.
That this anthropologist made in Cusco.
And we may get another speaker to talk about Cusco.
We're trying to give something back to the community because we've organized this conference.
It's too expensive for most of the people who live in the Sacred Valley to come.
So we're trying to open it up in a way to the community.
On the 8th of February, after the conference, we're going to do a mini film festival at this place called Zapiri, which is a shop in Cusco run by a British fellow that I know well.
I've done events with him.
It's called Zapiri Ground, and we're going to show this coca movie.
Which is called Cuckoo Sarai.
I'm not sure I'm saying it.
About the Carol people, about how they use coca.
We're going to show the McKenna's Academy movie Biognosis.
The subtitle is Bridges to Ancestral Wisdom.
We're going to show another couple of films.
So it'll be like a short, an afternoon film festival.
We're going to show the person that is.
Filming the conference for us and doing a lot of the background work as a gentleman named Louis Solerat, who is really a gifted filmmaker.
He used to be Brian Rose's producer.
Okay.
But he's been living in Peru ever since the pandemic.
And he's made a couple of amazing films, one of which is called Psychedelic Pandemic, about his experience being in Peru when the.
When the pandemic came, he went to Iquitos to take ayahuasca.
And he went to this retreat center and he figured he was going to be there a couple of weeks and then go back home.
And then the COVID pandemic came down and the country was locked down.
So his stay there extended from two weeks to five years.
He's still there.
Oh, wow.
And he's loving it.
I'm not leaving.
Yeah.
He's still.
Making amazing films.
So, we're going to show Psychedelic Pandemic, and he's made this other really interesting film called Ariana's Garden, which is about this young girl.
And it's basically a fiction, it's a short film, but it's about this young girl who has a personal relationship with the plants, you know, and she talks to the plants, right?
And her grandmother or somebody like that in the family is ill.
And, you know, they want to take the grandmother to Lima for treatment, and they're poor and they can't do it, you know.
And so Ariana, you know, goes into the garden and finds the plants to cure the mother.
And it's a very touching film.
So we're going to show that.
And it's amazing.
Yeah.
Sorry, was there something else you wanted to say?
Well, I was going to say, so that segues into the bile gnosis.
Can we talk about that a little bit?
Of course.
Okay.
So, under programs, this is a story as well.
Okay.
I have lots of stories.
Are we doing okay?
Herbarium.
In terms of, yeah, this is about the herbarium.
Okay.
Yes.
Are we going over time limits?
No, we don't have a time limit.
I've totally lost track of time.
We're good.
We're like three hours in right now.
So we can go as long as we want.
You don't care.
You could go all day.
I could go all day.
Would people listen all day?
Of course they do.
I don't know.
But yeah, so Bionosis is a project that we've been working on for, depending on when you start counting.
So I worked in my career, I worked very closely with this gentleman in Iquitos named Juan Ruiz, who was the curator of the herbarium at the university there.
Years.
We worked together.
I came as a graduate student in 1981.
He was a student there at the time, and he was at the time designated to be my guide, basically, by the guy who directed the herbarium at the time.
And I'm sure conversation was basically this gringo's here.
He's an idiot.
He's a tenderfoot.
Just take him to the field and get some plants.
Make sure he gets back alive.
And he did.
And we collected some plants and we formed a friendship.
And we've collaborated on various projects over the years.
Juan is an amazing person.
He is a scientist, he's a trained botanist, but he's also a medicine man.
He understands the use of these plants, and he grew up in Iquitos, so he knows the communities and the communities around there on the rivers and so on.
None of it's written down.
It's all in his head.
So, partly this plan, if you can scroll up, there's a description of it.
We have various aspects, various elements of this.
What we want to do is make documentaries about this herbarium, which we have made this Bionosis film.
It's about a 30 minute film, basically about the herbarium and what is being lost, the importance of the herbarium.
What does that mean, herbarium?
What does the word mean, herbarium?
The word?
Yeah, the word herbarium.
Herbarium is like a library of dried plant specimens.
Okay.
That's what it is, basically.
The podcast I sent you from, what's the podcast?
In Defense of Plants.
That fellow is the director of the herbarium at the Missouri Botanical Garden.
Okay.
And the reason it blew my mind when I stumbled on that is the Missouri Botanical Garden has a very close relationship.
To this herbarium in Iquitos.
One of their chief botanists at the time, Al Gentry, collected out of the UNAP herbarium at the Universidad Nacional Amazonía Paduana in Iquitos.
He collected out of there.
So when I was looking for something else and saw this podcast, I thought, this is an amazing connection.
I'm going to get in touch with him, see if we can initiate a collaboration, because what we want to do is save this herbarium and we want to.
Start by digitizing the specimens there.
And like the Missouri Botanical Garden, there's specimens, there's like 3 million specimens there.
At the UNAP Herbarium, there's only 150,000, so a tiny amount.
And only 50,000 of them are actually documented and mounted with labeled and entered into the library.
The rest of them haven't been mounted yet.
So, what we want to do is find the resources to mount the rest of the specimens and then digitize these specimens and put all that online and develop an interactive interface for examining the specimens.
So, this is what herbaria do these days.
All of the major herbaria in the world are digitizing their collections.
because then people could look at the specimens no matter where they are in the world.
One of our advisors on this project was a woman named Barbara Thiers, Dr. Barbara Thiers from the New York Botanical Garden.
She created a virtual herbarium at the New York Botanical Garden with four and a half million specimens in it.
Wow.
So she knows what she's doing.
Yeah, this shows, this is a trailer for the film.
And I'll send you a link where you can look at the full film.
It's only 30 minutes.
But scroll up or down to show those pictures.
It was back down, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So this shows this is Juan Ruiz.
And one of the documentaries, we want to make a series of documentaries, but the main one is we want to try to document what this guy knows, which is a tremendous amount.
I think he has a personal relationship with all the plants in the Amazon.
I mean, he knows all these species.
He can identify them at sight.
And I've collected with him in the field many times.
And he can take a leaf or a fragment of a plant often.
And I often have given him these things.
And he'll give you the scientific name, the common name, what it's used for.
Usually, some funny story about some botanist that came through 30 years ago and collected the plant.
Wow.
So, he's just a wise man of the forest in some ways.
And the herbarium is closing.
There's no money to keep it going.
So, what we're trying to do is find enough money to keep it going and document what Juan knows, you know, before he dies because he's not young.
I mean, he's like me.
He's A couple years younger than I am.
Wow.
Which is unfortunately not young.
Right.
Interactive Botanical Databases00:04:15
But so through this, we want, and we want to create an interactive interface to these collections so that rather than going to the website and just looking at a bunch of specimens, which is fine.
If you're a botanist, that's what you want.
You want to just be able to get to them.
But we want to make an AR interface.
AI and VR driven interface for these things.
We want to create a virtual reality interface so that instead of just looking at a bunch of specimens, you're actually looking at a virtual representation of the rainforest.
Oh, wow.
And you can fly through the rainforest, and in this VR, there will be little nodes, and every node is keyed to an herbarium specimen, right?
So you click on the node, and you can bring up the specimen.
And that will tell you what it is and where it is and who collected it and so on.
But then that could also link to all sorts of other databases that are out there.
That's incredible.
Genomic databases, phytochemical, ethnobotanical databases, and so on.
So, this is a big project.
This is, and right now, Juan is retired.
He's been forced to retire because the herbarium cannot, they just can't keep paying him, you know, even though he makes very little money.
But, you know, as a faculty member there, he makes, you know, I don't know.
Probably less than a thousand dollars a month, you know.
So it's very, but they can't afford it and they've closed their barium.
So this spring, after we get done with this COCA conference, we're planning to take some of these films and go on the road and do film festivals in different places.
We have the person that made the Bionosis film has a studio in New Brunswick.
Hemings House is the name of the company.
So we're going to start there.
He's got a venue identified where we can do it.
And then we're going to Halifax and then probably New York.
And we have a chance to present at Princeton as well.
So we're trying to raise money to do the herbarium.
And a big part of it is that we're trying to raise money so that we can pay Juan a stipend so that he can continue to live in dignity.
And I mean, right now, he isn't really.
Tough shape, you know, and he shouldn't have to be, you know.
So, we're trying to do that.
And when it comes to donors, if people want to support this Bionosis project, then sign on.
And, you know, people can support anything that the McCann Academy is doing.
I mean, we need support for the COCA project, we need support for Bionosis, and these are basically our two big things.
Yes.
Bionosis is the most long term one.
And anyone, you can go on the website.
We got donate buttons all over the place.
Beautiful.
You know, hear that here, folks.
All you listeners out there with money, mckennaacademy.com, bionosis, and coca conference.
We need to get that.
That's the kind of stuff that needs funding.
That's the stuff that.
But I must correct her.
I must correct you.
Oh, yes.
mckenna.academy.
mckenna.academy.
Yeah.
There's no.com.
Academy is the software.
Oh, it's just mckenna.
Oh, that's even better.
That's even easier.
Yes.
And like all nonprofits, we got donate buttons and we can also give people tax deductions.
We're a 501c3 nonprofit.
We can give people tax deductions.
If you're not in the States, it's a little more complicated, but you can still get a deduction.
Funding the McKenna Academy00:15:37
Look right there.
Right there.
Once, monthly, yearly.
Yeah.
That's beautiful.
And.
One other key email here.
Yeah, you can join our newsletter.
Also, do connect.
We do put out a newsletter.
And I'm doing a podcast, actually.
I am an amateur at this compared to you.
I mean, you're the master.
You're amazing.
You've been going on podcasts since like the early 2000s.
I have been doing podcasts.
Finally, I decided I'll do my own damn podcast.
And.
This is Louis Solerat.
This is the guy, the filmmaker I was telling you about.
So, yeah, the Brain Forest Cafe.
And we try to do these podcasts every week.
We release one every other Monday.
Okay.
You know, we don't have the resources to do them.
I mean, it takes a tremendous amount of focus and work to do these.
You know, you do these three or four times a week, right?
Yeah, two or three times a week.
Well, this is the first one we've done in two weeks because of the holiday break.
Because of the holiday.
But yeah, I mean, we had to get you on.
Halfway across the globe.
Yeah.
You came all the way from the top left corner of the continent.
Right.
We're on the opposite end.
I haven't done that.
We can't afford to bring people in in person.
And besides, nobody wants to go to my messy office.
But we got a lot of people here and some really good stuff.
That's amazing.
Wow.
You guys already have a pretty good library of podcasts on here.
You can search by topics.
That's really cool.
You can search by topics.
We need this.
That's great.
Yeah.
One more thing, I wanted to kind of like take a detour before we wrap this up.
Sure.
There was one more thing I really wanted to talk to you about that we didn't get a chance to talk about.
Okay.
Which was the studies that are going on with the extended state DMT.
I think it's called DMT X, where they're putting people on intravenous DMT.
Right.
And basically trying to map this DMT realm or this psychedelic realm.
Right.
What is your understanding of this and what?
Where is this right now and where is it going?
Well, I know most of the people involved in this.
There's a couple of different places that's going on.
There's one group in Boulder that's doing some work on this.
Medicinal mindfulness is what they're called.
A guy named Dan McQueen.
And then there's a UK, there's a group in the UK.
They're the ones that seem to be most involved with it.
Chris Timmerman and some other folks.
Well, it's a way to get around this problem that DMT is too short.
Right.
You know, that's it.
Extended state.
The idea is you can extend the state and.
But instead of using the MAOI.
Instead of using the MAOI, it's just.
You just do a slow drip.
Intravenous slow drip, and you can spend time in the DMT state.
I was originally.
A skeptic about this.
I was concerned.
Yeah, why were you a skeptic?
Well, I was concerned that prolonged exposure to DMT, putting yourself in this very strange place for.
I mean, one of the best things about DMT is very short.
I mean, in 20 minutes, it's over.
You can always look forward to that.
Right.
Just tell you, it's going to be over.
Exactly.
You can extend it for.
40 minutes, an hour, whatever.
I haven't done that.
And I, for various health reasons, I probably won't do it.
But I was skeptical that it might be dangerous.
But I guess not.
I mean, people are doing this.
It seems to be okay.
DMT is very non-toxic.
And the reason it's so short is that it's so quickly metabolized.
So you take it, and as soon as you take it, it starts disappearing.
From your system.
So, this is a way to keep the titers up.
One approach, well, there's a couple of approaches.
One approach that could work without going the intravenous route that I have tried that worked pretty good is to do vaping, do a vaporizer, not like these cartridges, but use like a volcano vaporizer or something like that.
You know, volcano vaporizers.
Right, yeah.
So if you can do that, if you can vaporize it, then you have this bag full of the smoke, right?
So you can control it.
The problem is you're so completely out of it, you don't want to have to fiddle with lighting matches and smoking pipes and this just.
And what I found when I did it was it was very, it was great actually.
There was not this, it didn't come down on you like a freight train.
When you've spoken, that's been my experience.
A very easy lift up into the place, very calm, tranquil, and then you could stay there.
And if you wanted to go up higher, you just take another toke, you know, and you on the breath out of this bag and you would ascend, float up there for a while, and then it would start to come down.
It was literally like being in a balloon.
That's the closest analogy I could give to it.
Start to drift down, yes, and you say, Well, No, this feels pretty good.
I think I'll go back up for a while.
And you could just float along for a long time.
And I haven't done the intravenous one, but it seems to me that this accomplishes the same thing.
And it was really quite nice.
I had one of the best DMT encounters I've ever had with that.
Really?
Yeah, yeah.
I did because it was so.
It was so non threatening.
It was so comfortable.
I mean, often DMT, at least for me, taking it in the old way, I mean, it's a trip.
You know, you got to get your courage screwed up and say, I'm going to do this.
I'm going to plunge into the abyss, you know, and hopefully the parachute will open, you know, and plug your nose and jump.
Yeah.
There's a lot of anxiety, but this was like, there's no anxiety.
It's like, this feels good.
I could stay here for a while.
I had a wonderful.
Experience, you know, an encounter with my ancestors and very much not so much about all the lights and bells and whistles, right?
Typical DMT experience is it was much more tranquil and mellow and actually just deep, you know, and I could just feel the love and no fear, no fear.
That was amazing.
The question is, what's going on?
Where is it?
Where are we going?
Like, In this place?
In this place.
Like how do we, how do we, what do we use to figure out what's going on and where we are and how real is it compared to where we're sitting right now?
And what does that mean?
Is it, is it some sort of simulation?
Does that prove, is it, is it sort of breaking down the walls to our, our brain that's filtering this reality that we're in right now?
Is it, is it, is it getting rid of all the filters?
And is it sort of like opening up and showing us more?
Is all that stuff that you see on DMT, is that normally all around us everywhere right now?
And when you're on DMT, the DMT is essentially filtering all that out.
It dissolves the filters.
Dissolving the filters, yeah.
It's something like that.
I mean, this thing, you know, you get into some pretty interesting epistemological, you know, areas here.
Like you say, is it real, right?
I start with the premise that anything you experience is real.
You know, yeah, it's real.
You experience it.
You know, an alien appears there on, you know, in the chair and, oh, okay, hello.
Well, it may not actually be physical presence, but you're experiencing it, so it's real.
Right.
Anything you experience is real, you know.
So, all this talk about all these paranormal phenomena, UFOs and whatever, they're real.
People experiencing that.
But then, that's just the first step.
Then, okay, is it, Within or is it without?
Yes.
What does that mean?
Is there really a within or a without?
You know, are these things because again, we had we talked before about the reality hallucination.
You know, we're in that we are in a simulation.
That's what the brain does, it simulates reality.
You know, sir, everybody's in a reality simulation, their own personal, you know, their own personal simulation, their own personal reality.
Hallucination, which fortunately happens to overlap with other people's and is pretty congruent with other people's, so it makes sense.
Otherwise, we'd all be isolated, you know.
I mean, presumably, there's something out there that we all share, but we're seeing this everything we experience is a reflection of our neurochemical brain states, basically.
And You can tweak it various ways, you know, with drugs or whatever, with feedback, with meditation, with, you know, shamanic practices, with sound, even.
You can alter states.
But everything filters through that neurochemical process.
Right.
You know?
Right.
And it's just, it's interesting that so many people have such similar experiences on DMT and even like seeing ancient symbols, ancient structures.
It's almost like it's transcending space and time and showing you an infinite loop of history and the world and every organism that's ever existed on this planet.
And even like language and codes and text.
And there's that video that I showed you or that you saw the podcast I did with that guy, Danny, who did the experiment with the laser where they shine a laser on the wall and all these people are experiencing.
The same thing, or seeing the same thing in the laser where there's this code that comes through.
Right.
And I admit I am puzzled by that.
I am not sure quite what to say about that.
I think it's very interesting that people do see the same thing.
I think it is a leap to go from that to say, well, this proves that we're living in a simulation.
Yes.
And I think that's quite a leap, you know?
Yes.
But then, you know, in science, and again, science is, you know, it doesn't have all the answers, but the scientific stance or the sort of scientific attitude is the application of Occam's razor is a good thing.
You know, Occam's razor basically said what is the easiest explanation?
What explains the data?
What is the most likely explanation that explains the data?
You know, so it's a leap to go from these people's experience and say, oh, that proves the world that, you know, it's the world's a simulation, which means we have to dump into the dumpster everything we thought we knew about the world.
And people are reluctant to do that.
I'm not sure exactly.
I think it may have to do with what we were talking about before about this the collective unconscious and the fact that we're all connected by this bedrock of the collective unconscious.
I think the, uh, You know, the Jungian notion of these archetypes in some realm, and we're just islands sticking up out of this ocean, but at the bedrock we're all connected.
That may be where these things reside.
And that's where it's not unlike the Platonic ideas about Plato's notion of the.
I mean, I think his idea for that was the, you know, the ideas.
You know, the shadows in the cave, that whole thing that what we're seeing is shadows in the cave.
Yes.
Yes.
I like the Jungian notion.
Makes sense.
It makes sense.
So maybe there is some place where the universal determinants of language, cognition, understanding, all of these things are shared.
Commonly, not through cultural filters.
What we see always comes through cultural filters.
Maybe there's something behind that that's more fundamental.
And DMT lets you look into that space temporarily, into that ancient brain.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's just a speculation.
Again, the question is how do you prove that?
How do you prove that's where it's coming from?
One thing I've always been.
A little sort of uncomfortable with, or, you know, just I belong to a chat group called Sentient Others,
and we've had several conferences, and that's a group in the UK mainly, and we've talked about it's basically about these entities that you encounter in these altered states, particularly DMT.
You know, these alien like entities that appear to be separate, that want to communicate with you.
Alien Entities in Dreams00:04:42
And one thing that bothers me a little bit about those things you see is they look like humans.
You know, I mean, they look basically like humans.
They don't.
There's a book that's been published recently.
It's called something like A Field Guide to.
Alien entities, or something like that.
I'll send you the PDF.
It's quite interesting.
But you look at all these, they're different.
It's an attempt to kind of classify them.
It's like a taxonomy of these different entities that you see.
And it's a good effort.
But I look at them, and most of them have a more or less humanoid form.
Right.
You know?
And so this suggests to me that, you know, these are like dreams.
These come from within, these come from the unconscious.
They, Don't necessarily represent anything out there.
There's something buried deep in the unconscious, is a possibility.
Where it gets kind of interesting is some of these things don't look human at all.
And then you wonder, what about the octopoid ones?
What about the insectoid ones?
Those kinds of things.
Now maybe we're getting somewhere.
Because there's no reason to think that.
Like we were talking about aliens before.
Yeah.
There's no reason to think that aliens are going to look like us.
Exactly.
There's no reason to think they won't look like us.
Yes.
That's what I wanted to ask you.
What do you make of all of the alien abduction accounts throughout history?
Do you think that that's something similar to like a DMT trip happening when someone's sleeping?
Or do you think like this is actually something that's happening exterior, like in the real world?
They're being brought somewhere.
You know, I mean, the short answer is I don't know.
I don't know.
I think that, yes, I think sometimes these are things that happen to people in hypnagogic states, in sleeping states, in dreams.
I mean, you've had very vivid dreams, right?
Yes.
And I guess we all have.
And there are people that are involved in lucid dreaming.
You know, it's just hard to say.
It's just hard to say.
And that's good.
I don't think there are any definitive answers to any.
At least we don't have them yet.
You know, have you ever read Oliver Sacks' book on hallucinations?
No, I haven't.
That's worth reading.
You wouldn't believe what he's reading.
I'm a big fan of Oliver Sacks, though.
Yeah, Oliver Sacks.
Yeah, it's a short book.
There's a whole documented clinical literature about what people see.
Check out, I think it's Charles Bennett syndrome, is one of these syndromes that's been studied by neurologists.
I think it's Charles Bennett syndrome, named after this guy.
Is that what it is?
Yeah, there you are.
Charles Bonnet syndrome.
That's right.
Memory fails.
Charles Bonnet sentiment condition that causes people with vision loss to experience hallucinations or see things that aren't there.
Right, right.
And there's one case study that they talk about this guy.
Maybe it was Charles Bonnet or someone that had this condition, but every night he would see a full brass band march through his room.
Wow.
With full lights and sound effects and everything.
You know, and this was like a nightly occurrence.
And it was like he was not upset.
He looked forward to it, he enjoyed it.
That's amazing.
Isn't that incredible?
That's fascinating.
Yeah.
So, hallucination.
Yeah, hallucination.
Yeah.
As above, so below.
Right.
Exactly.
Enjoying the Nightly Occurrences00:01:36
Well, Dennis, thank you very much.
This has been mind exploding and a very, very, very, very fun and eye opening conversation for me.
I really appreciate you traveling here and doing this.
I thank you for asking me.
Yes.
And as well, we will link the Cocoa Summit.
Down below for people to sign up and check it out.
It's happening in about three weeks, the first week of February.
First week of February, yeah.
Yeah.
Much appreciate that.
Get people to look at the website.
Oh, a couple of things.
If anyone wants to connect on the summit or anything else, they can always email Annette at mckenna.academy.
She is the conference coordinator and she basically does everything for.
A lot of other things for the Academy so that I can just come out here and rave.
She's the one that actually makes sure it works, you know.
Yes.
So she's a wonderful person.
Shout out to Annette.
She'll be very, yeah, A N N E T T E. Annette at McKenna.
Academy.
And also, I do want to thank my whole team at the Academy, just amazing humans, you know, really fine people.
And we're having fun, you know, we're having a lot of fun.