Dennis McKenna and Joe Rogan revisit Terence McKenna’s 1971 La Charrera experiment, where psilocybin mushrooms—found in cow dung—sparked a decade-long "superconducting resonance" quest blending DNA, sound, and alchemy. McKenna critiques Terence’s Time Wave Zero (November 2012 end-date) as untestable, yet acknowledges its cultural magnetism, including Rogan’s DMT-induced discovery of his brother’s lectures. They expose cannabis prohibition’s hypocrisy, citing an 80-year Montana sentence despite state compliance, and debate DMT’s dimensional access versus biochemical origins, referencing Rick Strassman’s studies and Pablo Amaringo’s art. The conversation culminates in a warning: psychedelics reveal reality’s suppressed strangeness, while institutions enforce rigid truths—from climate denial to corporate control—undermining humanity’s potential for radical self-awareness. [Automatically generated summary]
What are you doing with that sound, you son of a bitch?
Settle down.
Dennis McKenna, first of all, and your friends, I'm sorry, I forgot your names because we might have indulged in something that makes you forget things really quickly.
Well, one of the things that was always sort of charming about Terence was that it didn't really matter what he said.
I mean, I used to get after him and say, what you said 20 minutes ago didn't make any sense.
And it directly contradicts what you just said, which also doesn't make any sense.
But the thing is it doesn't matter because Terry, Terence, he could have read the phone book and it would have sounded great and people would be hanging on every word because he just had that gift.
He had the voice.
He could mesmerize people and he was obviously super intelligent, widely read, knew all this stuff as a result of his Reading in the Tussman program and before that, alchemy and, you know, black magic and Eastern philosophy and all of this stuff.
You know, I mean, he was by far a much broader scholar than I'll ever be.
I mean, I'm quite narrow, you know.
I mean, I know science.
That's what I know.
You know, not really, he was just incredible.
He could draw on so many, you know, threads of knowledge and people were hungry to hear it.
I mean, here was a guy who could say You know, he loved provocative statements, right?
He loved to, you know, antagonize, you know, make people think, and people wanted to be challenged.
You know, and that was part of his appeal, I think, a great deal of his appeal.
I remember in the early...
It was in the 80s, before anybody really got to know who Terence was, but he was out a few radio clips and that sort of thing.
But back in the early 80s, do you remember Sing Along with Mitch?
It was like this really cheesy, stupid music show with this guy Mitch...
Do you remember what his last name was?
I don't know.
But it was all about sing-along with Mitch.
And he would present the show and they'd sing all these old songs.
And he'd get people in the audience watching television to sing, right?
And so Terrence went on one of these programs and the moderator said, you know, you're like sing-along with Mitch, except it's like, think-along with Terrence.
Well, he had so many interesting ideas that opened up so many people to...
To new possibilities, but there were most certainly a few of them that were very, very controversial.
Time wave zero, novelty theory being a big one, which I tried to explain this to a friend of mine once, and just trying to explain it, I sounded completely crazy.
I said, it's a something...
He was trying to figure out how to measure time through using the I Ching, which is an ancient Chinese method of divination that's somehow based on...
Hexagrams and maybe a map of time.
And my friend looked at me like I was out of my fucking mind.
And I'm like, well, the idea is that time is like an algorithm somehow or another.
Well, to pursue this time wave theory, well, to explain that, we really have to go back to We should probably explain the time wave, too, for people who don't know what the hell we're talking about.
Well, the time wave theory is this mathematical construct, you know, based on the I Ching that Terence got basically downloaded to him when we did the...
What's been famously known as the Experiment at La Charrera, you know, which the book also talks about and which, again, a lot of people, if you're a Terence McKenna fan, you know what that is.
If you're not, you're wondering, what the hell is this, you know?
So, but the Experiment at La Charrera was when we Well, how do we explain it?
I don't even know if we could go into it on the podcast, but it was something that we attempted to do when we went to South America looking for exotic hallucinogens, and this was in 1971. And we were motivated...
I mean, I'm sort of getting off track here, but I'm trying to bring it back to the issue of the time wave.
We were motivated to go in 1971, basically by our interest and fascination with DMT. I mean, that was what...
Got us going.
Because we had encountered DMT in the Haight and in Berkeley in the 60s.
It was very rare.
You know, extremely not on the streets or anything.
It was hard to come by, but we had come by it.
I had the experience of it and thought, holy Christ, you know, there is nothing else more interesting than this that we've ever encountered.
And so, you know, we were involved in all the political turmoil and anti-Vietnam War movements You know, free speech and all of that.
Terence was at Berkeley.
I wasn't particularly.
But we just thought, you know, none of that is relevant.
This is truly the most amazing thing that we've ever encountered.
Our original motivation to go to South America was because, as you know, the smoking of DMT is very short.
It's 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and you come back and you're like, what the hell was that?
What the fuck was that?
You can't bring back much from it other than just an overwhelming impression of awe and amazement and that you've looked into some other world that's more...
Bizarre than anything you've ever seen encountered.
So we thought if we could find an orally active form of this DMT, that it would last longer.
That was a simple rationale.
It would last longer and we could kind of get our sea legs there and figure out what was going on.
A drug prepared from a species of tree in South America is called varolas and Schultes, the famous ethnobotanist from Harvard, published a paper in 1970 called Varola as an Orally Active Hallucinogen.
Now, varola is normally used as a snuff in South America.
I mean, the certain tribes, the Yanomamo and other tribes, Extract the sap, they dry it down, they make a snuff out of it.
But there were a couple of tribes that made an oral preparation from it.
So that attracted our attention, and we decided to go to South America and look for, you know, this Witoto drug called Ukuhe, or something like that, Ukuhe.
And it happened to be that the ancestral home of the Witoto was at La Chirera.
That's what led us to go to La Chirera originally, right, was the search for this drug that...
No one ever heard of, except us and Ari Schultes.
And so we went there, looking for that, and...
Well, at the time, nobody knew much about ayahuasca.
I mean, ayahuasca is also an orally active form of DMT, but we didn't know that at the time, and nobody did.
Maybe we can talk about that later.
But we went looking for ukuhe, right?
When we got to La Charrera, we found that The mission village that we set up, that we stayed at, the Mission La Torreira, had cleared pastures all around, about a couple hundred acres of pastures.
And they brought Cebu cattle into this place, the white humpback cattle.
Well, the shit, the dung of this cattle is the preferred substrate for psilocybin cubensis.
And it was a particularly rich year that year.
I mean, a lot of rain, mist on the pasture and all that.
So literally every cowpaw had huge clusters of psilocybin mushrooms, you know, growing out of them, right?
And again, this was 1971.
A lot of people hadn't had much experience with psilocybin mushrooms.
But we knew from our references what this mushroom was.
We'd never taken it, but we thought, great, psilocybin mushrooms, wonderful.
So we were misled, right?
We thought that ukuhe was the real mystery.
That we were after.
It turns out psilocybin mushrooms were the real mystery, and psilocybin is in fact the perfect orally active form of DMT, right?
The psilocin, the active form of psilocybin, is just one atom different from DMT, and it's perfectly engineered for human metabolism.
It's non-toxic.
It's orally active.
It's easily, you know, excreted.
It's ideal.
It really is.
It's a perfect psychedelic in some ways.
So we thought, but at the time we thought we were after ukuhei.
So we thought, well, Okay, so these mushrooms are here.
This is great.
Well, we're waiting for the real mystery.
Well, we can eat these mushrooms.
Well, we started eating the mushrooms.
And pretty soon, things got very weird.
Because we were literally eating them every day.
And they were...
We just started having a lot of very interesting conversations, shall we say.
You know, I mean, there wasn't that much to eat at La Chereur.
We had brought canned goods and rice and things like that, but we found that it was very easy to just kind of slip a few mushrooms into the soup, you know?
They didn't taste bad.
So probably for a week or ten days or so, we were pretty much taking mushrooms constantly.
The intelligence that spoke through the mushroom, you know, it was never quite clear, but there was definitely, it was like having a very intelligent guest at your party, and, you know, you didn't see it, but you definitely were in touch with it.
And it began to suggest this experiment that we could do, I mean, this wild experiment, the experiment of La Charrera.
And, uh...
Uh...
I don't know how much detail you want to go into on this, but we performed this experiment, trying to get it back to the I Ching and the time wave thing.
We performed this experiment, which was something like...
Creating the philosopher's stone, essentially, out of our own DNA and the DNA of a mushroom and sound and light and singing to the mushroom and coming up, you know, creating these superconducting resonances and, you know, I mean, crazy stuff.
You can read about it in the book, you know, but we had this idea that we could essentially...
I mean, I guess I should back up and explain it.
We had this idea that the sounds That you could hear on high doses of mushrooms.
I don't know if your experience with DMT, you hear things, right?
You often hear over-tonal sounds and the whole aural space is as interesting as the visual space in some ways.
Well, on high doses of mushrooms, that's similar as well.
And, you know, if you listen to these sounds, you can start to sort of try to imitate them and, you know, you can sing along with them or you can vocalize along with them.
And the attempts to vocalize them are generally not so good, they're hard to imitate, but you reach a certain point where you just lock on to it and then it just pours out of you in a very powerful way and in a way that it's like almost being possessed or something.
This sound energy just pours forth.
So the mushroom suggested to us a lot of ideas about what these sounds were and how they could actually set up molecular resonances in our own brains, our own DNA, and the DNA of a mushroom, and that we could essentially...
Well, in some ways, create the ultimate object.
Create the ultimate artifact, which would be ourselves, our own minds in an externalized form.
It was, the mushroom was, you know, the mushroom or whoever was communicating through the mushrooms was just matter-of-factly sort of wrapping this down.
And, you know, we were receptive to it and it was like we're writing furiously and it's like we developed this experiment, this idea, which had a whole lot of predictions.
I mean, crazy predictions that, yeah, you would actually have, at the end of the day, Or the night, more accurately, you would have a physical object that would be outside the body, but it would be you.
And it turns out there's all sorts of precedent for this, right?
I mean, the idea of the alchemist's stone, the philosopher's stone, or...
The time machine, the flying saucer, the alchemist scrying mirror that you can look into and see the future.
I mean, this idea haunts The human imagination.
That there is a way you can externalize the imagination and still be it.
And this thing that you would have, or whatever it was, would be responsive to your imagination.
And it would be able to do literally whatever you could imagine.
And there's actually a term in this for psychology.
In psychology, it's called the folia du.
It's the folly of two.
Simultaneous...
You know, psychosis, essentially.
But it wasn't a psychosis.
That's the thing.
People have to understand.
It wasn't a psychosis.
If anything, it was closer to a shamanic I mean, the motifs of shamanic initiation more than the motifs of psychosis fit what went on.
We were transformed, and we were transformed in a complementary way.
And we also reintegrated, more or less, you know, so that, I mean, I'm fairly functional now.
I don't know that I've ever totally reintegrated, but you know what I mean.
It wasn't a Shamanic initiation is where you go through this metamorphosis, and things are done to you, and you're torn apart, and you're changed, but then you're put back together in a different form.
And that's really what happened.
But I wasn't put back together as the superconducting, Bionic creature with access to all information and all space and time.
That didn't happen.
You know, and so...
To try to bring this around to wither the time wave.
The time wave came about because Terence was in this hypervigilant state where he didn't sleep for 14 days.
He was watching over me, for one thing, because I tended to wander off and I was completely...
Three sheets to the wind, literally.
And off in this cosmic fantasy world.
But he was very focused.
But he started making charts of time.
He was trying to predict...
We had done this experiment and we had predicted that the stone would condense in this physical form.
And at the end of the experiment, that didn't happen.
But we were getting the message that...
We did everything right.
It's just your timing that's off.
And it will come, right?
The stone will condense at some points.
But so it became this whole game sort of of trying to predict when will the stone condense.
And so Terence began charting our course, you know, and he found like he was...
He counted back 64 days, two times 64 days to the...
From the date of the experiment and it turns out that was the date of our mother's death, the previous October, right?
And then he started counting forward from that date several cycles of 64 and it turns out that was his birthday in 1971. So that became a sort of focus for predicting when it would condense.
That course came and went.
So over the years he tried to I guess fine-tune this prediction, fine-tune this, and that's what the whole elaborate time-wave theory grew out of.
If there was an alien artifact that was given to us by this experiment, then it was this.
It was this mathematical construction, which wasn't given to me, it was given to him.
What was given to me were I mean, the experience of being smeared over the cosmos and then gradually over 14 days basically condensing myself back into a body.
Do you subscribe to the idea that these ancient cultures like the Mayans and these people that have these incredible structures, that very likely this was psilocybin-induced or their culture was psilocybin-induced?
They knew about You know, they knew about all the Central American ones, the Morning Glories, Olaliuki, the, you know, probably Salvia, probably all of those.
But the Mayans definitely knew about mushrooms.
And I think it's likely that mushrooms, you know, I mean, if you talk about the stoned ape theory, you know, which you've talked about and Terence has talked about, it's most likely mushrooms, you know, because mushrooms are, It's pan-global.
They're found in every climate.
You know, if it's tropics, it's psilocybe cubensis.
If it's temperate, it's psilocybe semilanciata.
But these things are all over the place.
They're potent.
They don't require any preparation, right?
No technology needed other than the curiosity to bend over, pick it up, and munch it.
And once you do that, then the impact had to be profound.
And we're talking about omnivorous primates here who are hungry all the time, very acutely You know, keyed into their environment, I mean, it's not like they're going to overlook this, right?
And so they test this, and then they get the message.
And I think that, you know, In the stoned ape theory, there are things that are puzzling to me that I totally don't completely understand.
If you look at the archaeological evidence for the critical period when consciousness emerged in our species, Except for a couple of indications that go way back, like half a million years.
But, you know, the efflorescence of artistic expression, which is really the only way you can tell, happened sometime between 100,000 years ago and 8,000 years ago.
You know, you look at the cave paintings and some of the oldest ones, the Blombos Cave in South Africa goes 80,000 years.
Those artifacts were clearly done by conscious beings with an artistic sense.
So if that equates to cognition, then clearly consciousness was happening somewhere after 100,000 years.
Up until now, presumably, you know, consciousness was happening.
But if you look at the fossil record, the neurologically modern brain was much older than that, you know?
I mean, essentially, You know, at least 100,000, maybe 200,000 years older than this emergence of consciousness.
You know, the neurologically modern brain with all the apparatus needed to generate language, right?
And it's all about language.
And it's about making this connection between sound, image, and symbol.
You know, meaningful symbol.
And I've argued in...
A lot of lectures and so on.
I mean, my shtick, if you will, that what this amounts to is synesthesia, right?
Synesthesia being the translation of one sensory mode to another.
Well, like psychedelics do, right?
Reliably induce synesthesia, where you can hear colors and see sounds.
That's the most trivial aspect of it.
Most people can't do that without psychedelics, but some can.
Some people are genetically synesthetic, and their experience of meaning and language is very different.
It's interesting that synesthesia in genetically synesthetic people is often associated with language and number.
So they'll say crazy sounding stuff like, you know, the letter C is hard and chrome colored.
And they're speaking in the abstract, but this is an actual perception for them.
Or they'll talk about the personality of the number nine.
I mean, I think they are aware of their sort of cognitive environment, if you want to put it that way, The same one that we inhabit, but a lot of this stuff goes into the background for us, right?
Unless we take a psychedelic or something like that, and then it comes out into the foreground.
It goes on in the background.
That's essentially what I'm saying.
The process of understanding language is a process of synesthesia.
That we're not even aware of.
We live in a world in which abstractions and symbols are as real as anything in the outside world.
We live in a world in which symbols have significance, and that is the basis of language, our ability to perceive meaning.
and it's based on this sort of unconscious synesthesia, which we do all the time.
And mushrooms may, I mean, with respect to the evolution of the primate brain, what I think I'm postulating is that, you know, something like mushrooms were able to trigger these types of synesthetic something like mushrooms were able to trigger these types of synesthetic experiences in people and essentially became training tools for learning cognition, training tools for learning, you know, how to associate meaning with meaningless
how to associate meaning with meaningless sounds and essentially And ROQs, but it made the essential connection to significance, the feeling of significance.
We didn't even really describe the theory for people who don't know what the higher primate theory is, or excuse me, that's why, that's his t-shirt here.
The stone dape theory is that Psilocybin mushrooms, or psychedelic mushrooms, were responsible for creating human beings.
And one of Terence's assertions was that the doubling of the human brain size occurred over a period of about two million years.
And that this correlates to the timeline of these rainforests receding into grasslands, and then these monkey apes experimenting with different food sources.
Does that stuff all jive with core samples and climate studies?
Is all that stuff the same time with the human brain size doubled?
I don't think you could put your finger on any one factor and say this was responsible for the expansion of the human brain, but definitely the...
You know, transition from arboreal to plane-type existence, existence on the Serengeti, was a time of incredible environmental stress for these primates.
And for the whole environment, they had to adapt.
And they had to, you know, learn a whole new diet, a whole new mode of existence.
And it's not clear the time frame that this took place over.
But I think that...
And it's not clear how much of it just happened.
I mean, it's not clear that this necessarily triggered consciousness, but it certainly...
It triggered adaptations in these primates that they were forced into, so that perhaps got them ready when the time came.
That's the part that's difficult to predict or nail down.
How long, how far back Were these mushrooms used?
You know, was it a transient thing?
Or did the climate change?
You know, was there a point around 100,000 years ago where the climate in that area got much wetter and suddenly these things became more common?
Or were they always there?
And, you know, it's just difficult.
But I think one of the characteristics that we do know about psychedelics is that they can induce this feeling of what's been called portentousness, right?
The feeling of a feeling that an experience, something is significant.
It's a feeling of reverence or awe or, you know, All of those things that we associate with religious sensibilities.
It's not that psychedelics...
There are religions that have been founded around psychedelics.
Obviously the mushroom cults and all of these things.
But psychedelics are not a religion.
They are, in a sense, the religion.
Or they hit those parts of our brain that are capable of having religious responses in some way.
And so when you get that going, then you have these primates with a sense of being...
In touch with some, you know, in touch with some transcendent other that is more significant than themselves that they feel longing for.
And I think that's the religious sensibility and that's also what drives our species forward.
You know, is this longing to know the unknown, essentially.
You know, I mean...
Terence talked about, and actually Rudolf Otto talked about, that the psychedelics are a mysterium tremendum, right?
Rudolf Otto talked about this.
They are a tremendous mystery that is terrifying and fascinating at the same time.
This has been the continuing carrot that's pulled our species forward.
In my lectures, I sometimes liken them to the idea of the monolith in 2001. Kubrick tried to concretize that idea, the idea of the monolith, something that's utterly alien, totally incomprehensible, completely terrifying.
And fascinating, right?
They can't take their eyes off of it, and it inserts itself into history or evolution at critical junctures.
It just shows up, you know, and things happen.
And I'm saying we don't need to invoke the monolith because that's what the psychedelics in nature are, you know, our own built-in monolith, you know, built into the biosphere.
I mean, even, you know, Graham Hancock talks about this, the person that wrote...
This very interesting book about the cave paintings.
The Mind and the Brain is the name of the book.
I forget the author at the moment.
But this very well respected South African scholar who wrote a book about how altered states in You know, shamanic rituals carried out in the dark or in the almost total darkness in these caves.
That's what the cave paintings were about.
These things were painted by people in highly altered states doing shamanic ceremonies.
But even the guy who wrote the book will not take mushrooms.
You know, Graham Hancock...
Attempted to get him to.
I mean, he wrote about his work with great enthusiasm and admiration and said, you know, if you want to confirm your theory, this is what you do.
I mean, it seems to me it would hurt him because drugs are verboten.
But in fact...
That is the honest thing to do as a scientist.
And I think if enough of the right people, you know, the people in this field actually would let themselves have this experience, I think the controversy would resolve itself.
Because those of us who have experienced it, it just seems obvious.
It just seems, it's very strange to me that it's not considered even as a factor at all when if you've had the impact, you've had the experience personally, you know the incredible impact that it has.
How could that not be considered in terms of Something that affects consciousness.
If you're talking about someone who has no science, someone who has no books to read, someone who has, you know, whatever language existed at the time, having a blowout psychedelic experience would be so staggeringly profound on the shaping of your vision of the world that it's weird that it's not considered.
And it's really a shame as far as the way the people that educate people in this world, whether it's in high school or whether it's in Universities or colleges that they personally are not aware and or have been educated by this experience because it's not what everybody thinks it is.
Everyone has this idea that it's escape from reality, you're running away from things, you're clouding things up with drugs and that because it's under this one blanket, this one blanket of description, drugs, It's really weird that it's not considered as a factor in the development of the human being.
No, well, exactly, because of the rubric it's put under.
I mean, people, it's one of these things that exists in the shadow, you know, it's in the shadow and the reason it's in the shadow Is because it is a true mystery.
And true mysteries are freighted with numinosity, right?
With the numinous.
And, you know, I mean, despite the lip service that the church pays to all this stuff, I mean, the main mission of the church is to...
Ensure that people do not have genuine religious experiences, right?
I mean, that's the most dangerous thing to the church that there could possibly be if someone bypasses all the priests and the whole, you know, hierarchical structure and just goes out and talks to God.
Well, God's gonna give you a different message than the priests are giving you, I tell you.
What did you think of John Marco Allegro's work, the sacred mushroom in the cross, his assertion that, for the folks who don't know this one, just a brief one, he was a scholar who was an ordained minister who became a theologian.
As he was studying theology, he became agnostic and reviewed, according to him, the Dead Sea Scrolls and believed at the end of 14 years of studying it that it was essentially The entire Christian religion was about psychedelic mushroom use and fertility cults.
He wrote this book called The Sacred Mushroom on the Cross.
His assertion is that Jesus actually was a mushroom.
Well, I don't know if Jesus was a mushroom, but I do think that Allegro was a serious scholar, and I think it's a shame that he was vilified the way he was, because he was a philologist, right?
He was a specialist in these Aramaic languages.
He was one of the people appointed, one of the scholars appointed to the translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
And he was incidentally, apparently, according to Andy Redovit and people like that, he was the only one who wasn't a priest on this committee, for one thing.
So he was immediately sort of outside the officially approved circles.
I think to the...
I'm not a philologist, but I think to the extent that...
I mean, you know, so I'm not really qualified to interpret...
Whether his scholarship was together or not, he was well enough qualified to be appointed to this translation committee, so he must have had something going for himself.
And when, as his account is, he says, honestly, you know, when I reviewed all this stuff and began to put two and two together, it seemed that there were all these allusions to fungi.
So I think that he was a good example of an honest scholar who...
Honestly reported what he found and his message was unacceptable.
And so the establishment, the powers that be, the higher authorities, decided basically he had to be destroyed.
And he was.
His reputation was thoroughly trashed.
Now, is it true?
I mean...
Was Jesus a mushroom?
Did they use Amanita muscari or some other mushrooms?
I think it's likely.
We know that the Gnostics, which is the pre-Christian or quasi-Christian group that wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, out of which Christianity supposedly I mean,
the God of the Bible of Genesis was seen in Gnosticism as an evil entity, right?
Because it was keeping humanity imprisoned in the world of matter.
When the soul longed to be liberated into the light and all that.
So that was his view of this whole thing.
Not Allegro's view, but that was the view of Gnosticism.
That's a pretty psychedelic vision right there.
know, it wouldn't surprise me at all if this group, you know, was using either Amanita muscaria and/or some kind of psilocybin mushrooms.
The craziest quote from the book was that he had translated the word Christ back to an ancient Sumerian word which meant a mushroom covered in God's semen.
It's weird that, to me, that with the incredible power that the psychedelic mushrooms must have had on ancient people.
We know people have been taking them for a long time.
We know for sure they existed.
How are they not being used all throughout these religions today?
How did all the different intellectual societies of this world lose touch with perhaps the very thing that gave us our initial intellectual curiosity?
How did that happen?
How could it happen that at the highest levels of learning, which is where we're at in 2012, if you follow a linear timeline, this is as advanced as we've ever been.
So if that is the case, how is it possible that it's removed from CNN and the New York Times?
It's not something that's being not just a once in a blue moon John Hopkins study which shows that it improves your personality, but some legitimate consideration to that it might have been a factor in why we're here.
And one of the reasons why we're so fucked up, one of the reasons why our society is so crazy is because we're detached from One of the very things that might have created this human being in the first place.
That seems to me to be something that should be considered.
It seems to me like if you look at all the other factors like eating meat and the throwing arm and figuring out complex problems and hunting and all the things that could have happened, how could you not?
Be looking really closely at this one mushroom that makes you see incredible visions, explore realms that seem realer than this reality that we live in right now.
The only reason is because either you haven't experienced it or you have experienced it and you're terrified and you're trying to Keep everyone else from it.
What we have to understand, the proper venue, if you will, or the proper human institution to kind of be the steward of this mystery, it's a real mystery, right?
Even though we understand a lot about the neuroscience, we can talk about neurochemistry and receptors and all that, that does not make the connection or cross the bridge between what we experience when we take it.
We know all about the underlying neurophysiology of it, but it still doesn't bridge the gap to what we actually experience.
So it's important.
So I say it remains a mystery, as does the very...
You know, conundrum of consciousness.
You know, how does the brain-mind generate or experience consciousness?
But, you know, it is a genuine mystery and Human institutions and properly should be the province of religion, but religions don't serve that anymore.
Religions are political institutions, right?
I mean, if they have a real mystery, they want to put it in a box and put it over here someplace and keep people from it, you know?
Because that gets in the way of promulgating the doctrine, and the doctrine is, you know, toe the line, don't ask too many questions, have faith, right?
You must have faith, which generally means, which means essentially you have to believe a lot of stuff we tell you for which there's no evidence.
So have faith, don't ask too many questions, you know, and basically toe the line.
So they're political institutions, religions are.
They're into bludgeoning people.
Into a certain mode of behavior.
And they work in conjunction now in our culture with governments and corporations.
And to have people, you know, taking mushrooms and having all these funny ideas and questioning the status quo, this is not, this doesn't serve the agenda, you know.
I mean, whether they do it out of ignorance or whether there's a more sinister agenda.
Which is, you know, perhaps some of them have had this experience and realize that for people to be having these types of experiences is a threat to the status quo.
Because exactly as you say, it motivates us to change the way we are, to change the way we relate to the world, you know, and we're no longer good people.
I think it's ironic, just in a way, back in the 60s, DMT used to be called the businessman's trip.
The idea was you could smoke it on your lunch hour and get back to work after your lunch hour, except that after you smoked DMT. Who would even want to go back to your cubicle?
So they're inherently subversive in the sense that they encourage people to take personal responsibility for themselves and think for themselves.
Thinking for oneself is a discouraged activity these days.
There's also the issue of a lack of guidance in this country, especially when it comes to these different things because of the fact that they're illegal.
I think that despite all the resistance, that's probably where it's going.
And it will happen in a very...
I think that's a subtle way, and it won't attract a lot of attention.
But I think that, you know, until it's a done deal, in a sense, I think that what we're witnessing now is that with this psychedelic renaissance, you know, in the 60s and all that, that's all gone.
A lot of the hysteria has died down.
And now we're in a position to revisit this whole thing and take a second look in a calmer way.
And I think a lot of the research that you see happening is going to...
I mean, I know the institution I'm affiliated with in that respect is the Hefter Research Institute.
People should check that out, hefter.org, because most of the leading researchers in psychedelics are on our board, right, or either on our board or supported by Hefter to some degree.
But the work that people like Roland Griffiths are doing, there are other investigators, but he's well known, What he's doing is the way you open the door to the use of these things is two paths, either religious or medicine.
If you can find a legitimate medical use for psilocybin, then that changes everything because that means that the FDA can be pressured to change the scheduling of it.
Once the scheduling of it has changed, it's now Schedule 1, right?
And the first criterion of Schedule 1 is a dangerous drug with no possible medical use.
Well, if you do good, rigorous science and you do several clinical studies, which is what they're doing with this psilocybin end-of-life kind of approach to it, helping people to come to terms With their impending death and deal with the anxiety and the spiritual crisis around that, that's essentially what they're using.
But if you can show legitimately that it has a use in that respect, then you can change the regulatory framework.
You can actually get it Approved for that use.
Once it's approved for that use, you have to change the scheduling of it from Schedule 1 to probably Schedule 2. But then you open up the possibility of off-label uses, right, as with any drug.
And then therapists can start to use it.
And I think that you will see in 10 years, maybe, you will see Exactly that.
You will see institutes, places where you can go.
I mean, the next step is to say, well, if psilocybin can benefit dying people, maybe it can benefit well people.
Maybe it can help well people.
People who are not sick come to terms.
PTSD, another example, you know.
But just spiritual evolution, just a discipline, you know, which is what shamanism is.
People have to go to South America now to find this stuff.
And they do, and a lot of them go there because they're not finding any spiritual satisfaction in our own institutions.
So what we have to do is create our own institutions that are not copies of South American shamanism, but our own neo-shamanism, in a sense, that borrows from these different traditions.
But back to the question, do you see that the classification from marijuana, which still...
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, even some really interesting stuff about cancer.
All that Rick Simpson hemp seed oil, or I guess it's really hash oil, because it is psychoactive.
He calls it hemp oil, I guess maybe to make people feel better about it.
Whatever it is, the work that that guy's done, All the different studies have shown what it does for glaucoma patients, what it does for wasting syndrome, and people who have a hard time getting...
Why is there no change in the classification of that?
Because it seems like there's a good body of work that shows some medical uses for it.
Especially when you consider that cocaine is Schedule II. Right.
The whole situation in a way is I think with respect to cannabis is is somehow different because it's so freighted with political considerations.
I mean that don't really plague the psychedelics to the same extent because even though we're immersed in this world of psychedelics and we think it's important we're still talking you know two three percent of the population at most if that even gives a shit about psychedelics marijuana is like sixty percent of the population so I just think you're seeing...
I mean, I don't know.
I think the pharmaceutical cartel in some ways is lined up against this because medical marijuana is potentially so useful for so many things that they're making money on right now by making drugs to treat them.
And if you look at their...
Research efforts, if you look at what's going on in the back room and they're not talking about, they're totally into cannabinoid chemistry, right?
I mean, they're developing all kinds of pharmaceuticals, but those are patentable compounds that they can own and produce synthetically and charge you a lot of money for.
So I think that pot is a threat to the I think the government is kind of deer in the headlights about it, you know, as the Obama administration's reaction to the latest legalization.
I mean, finally they're beginning to get their act together and say the right thing, which is, okay, apparently we'll just let this social experiment go forward and see where it goes, which is the right thing to do.
And I think if they do that, you'll see it evolve.
Other states will say, well, Washington and Colorado legalized pot.
They didn't collapse, and they're making a lot of money off taxes.
And physically because you're going to be freaking out because you're thinking you might have to go to jail because federally what happens is when you are not violating state law but you are violating federal law, when you go to trial they don't even let you use the term medical marijuana.
It's not allowed to be used in court.
It's inadmissible.
So there is no medical marijuana in the eyes of the federal government.
So you can't even defend yourself by telling the people in the jury that you were not in violation of a state law.
Unquestionably, you're putting people in jail that do not, not only do they not deserve to be in jail, they haven't done anything wrong.
They're providing people with something that they want and they're doing it according to a law.
It's a state law and that is a real sickness when people think that they're vindicated or justified in some way for locking those people in cages.
Those are the real criminals.
That's the real criminals in our society is the people that are locking people in jail for pot.
That's a real sickness.
And the hypocrisy is just so outstanding in everywhere, in every bar, in every drugstore, everywhere you go there's alcohol, and yet you're going to lock these people in a cage for doing something that's not nearly as bad.
The fact that you could get this vote in Washington, Colorado, is a very hopeful thing.
if they will let it go forward, then over time they'll begin to see the benefits of that, right, in the sense that exactly as you say, pot smoking is not nearly as harmful as alcohol.
So you'll see reduced traffic fatalities.
You know, people may be driving stone, but they're safer drivers if they're stone, if they're intoxicated.
You'll see reduced incidences of domestic violence and other kinds of violence.
You'll see that actually letting people smoke pot alleviates a lot of societal problems.
It won't eliminate them, but you'll see statistically significant reductions in a lot of the parameters.
Because we know that alcohol fuels violent behavior.
It fuels domestic violence, traffic accidents, all this stuff.
Those things will be reduced if people start smoking pot in place of that.
I guess I'm just disappointed in the fact that it's taken so long that I've become kind of cynical, the way the government approaches it, because it just seems so ridiculous at this point.
I mean it's like this policy has so long been in place and there's so much inertia behind it, right?
There's the whole law enforcement infrastructure, the DEA, the prison industrial complex, the – I mean so many things depend on – It's not just the drug cartels, and their profits go away, but the whole governmental infrastructure to support the...
And for people, for the government to maintain that marijuana has no medical application is just absurd.
I mean, it's just absurd.
Although they do everything they can to discourage research.
Out of one side of their mouth, they say, well, we want people to apply for grants and we encourage research, but then they make it impossible to get legitimate sources of cannabis to do the research.
So which is it?
So it's a bad situation.
But I would say this.
I would say that we have to remember, we have to take a longer term Sort of view of this, and we have to remind ourselves that we're witnessing a...
What is really going on here is a co-evolution, you know, between us and these plants.
And this has been going on for, we don't know how long, a hundred thousand years at least.
Cannabis is among those plants, right?
If you take a small slice of historical time and say, what is our current, you know, species relationship with these plants?
It doesn't look very good, you know, they're being suppressed and all that.
But it's a small slice of time.
In the end, the plants win, right?
Because this is what's going on.
The plants win.
You cannot eradicate cannabis from the face of the earth, much as they might want to, and they really don't want to.
There's a terrible case about a guy in Montana who was a grower who was following the state law, even had state law enforcement authorities on a regular basis come out to his grow houses and he showed them what he was doing.
He was providing for all these different patients in Montana and this guy's up for 80 years in jail.
He's up for more in jail than he would be if he killed somebody.
Jail is 25 to life for murder, and this guy is – it's 80 years is his potential sentence.
It's insane.
For growing some plants that the state approved – the state made a law.
They approved it.
He was there.
He brought the state people in.
They said, yep, everything's good.
Brought the state police in.
Yep, everything's good.
Okay, we're good?
Okay, we're good.
Let's grow some pot.
Grows the pot, gives it to all the sick people.
And now this poor guy is up for an 80-year stretch.
Now, as a man of science, and you clearly are, how do you feel when you see, like, CNN and you see, like, Dr. Drew talking all this craziness on CNN about...
Withdrawal symptoms and withdrawal syndromes, he was saying, from cannabis use and about the cannabis today is so much stronger than it was when we were younger.
It's incredibly dangerous.
These words, incredibly dangerous.
It's like I hear this nonsense and I'm like, this is again a man who can't see describing a kaleidoscope.
This is a person who doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about.
A guy who's incredibly straight.
And he's describing something and it's always negative.
Ignore every artist.
Ignore every person who tells you it makes food taste better and makes sex feel better.
Ignore all that.
Ignore all these people that are quoting all these positive things and focus on what is most likely bullshit.
If you go by personal experience, like what we all know, if someone is having psychotic episodes because of marijuana, I have got to think they're going to have psychotic episodes anyway.
I got to think marijuana just got them there, but they were already fucked.
I mean, I would have to assume, just knowing my own personal experience with a drug.
When someone who hasn't had an experience with a drug and they're talking about it, it's maddening.
It's about empowering people to make informed decisions about what kind of substances they're going to use, under what circumstances, what their intentions are.
There's a protocol.
There's a way to use these things in a positive way and a way to use them destructively.
I'm fond of, I mean, I always tell my students, there is no such thing as a bad drug.
Or a good drug.
They don't have moral qualities.
Human beings have moral qualities.
There are plenty of opportunities to misuse a drug or use a drug in a bad way.
That's not the drug's fault.
It simply has the pharmacological chemical properties that it has.
It's human behavior is what we need to focus on and that's what drug education doesn't focus on.
It talks about the drugs almost as though they were demons or pathogens or like they had some kind of independent existence and they were an evil virus or something.
They are not.
It's the way people use them and what needs to happen with drug education They don't want to admit this, but here's the bald truth on it.
It's not about telling people, do not use drugs.
They say, that's got to be the message, and that's the only message.
True drug education has got to tell people how to use drugs.
That's the difference.
If you choose to use a psychoactive substance, then here's a way to use it.
Here's what you do to maximize the benefit of it and minimize the harm.
It's simply that simple.
But drug education, you can't institutionalize programs that are going to tell people how to use drugs.
Well, I think we're big on people figuring out shit for themselves, which is why we send people out into the world essentially with almost no knowledge whatsoever about sex and love.
When you're young, you just sort of have to stumble into it at your most vulnerable and confused time.
That's a joke and what's also a joke is just the raising of human beings.
I think so many people in this country are being raised by people who are essentially children their entire life.
They never really did develop A true understanding of themselves or their place in the world or an objective sense of this whole thing and the great mystery of it all that's never conveyed and then they raise children.
The children have to somewhere or another wake up and go, okay, nobody knows what the fuck is really going on here.
We live in a world of madness and momentum, and it just continues in the same path, even though everyone knows it's crazy.
But can you imagine, I mean, how many people can step out of that framework?
You know, it's rare.
It's not enough time.
You know, if you grow up, if you're raised in a religious household, you know, especially a fundamentalist household, you're not encouraged to think about very much, right?
The issue is when someone is thinking about what they should do and it's already written for them.
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Everybody's situation is different.
Everybody's life is different.
Your wants and needs are different.
And instead of all these different ideas of what we're supposed to do and not supposed to do and what is evil and what is good, We've lost the ability to figure out what kind of an impact what we're doing has on other people and judging that first and foremost.
And that, I think, is very much a religious and a psychedelic principle.
That idea, the idea of looking at everything as how it's affecting the other people around you first.
And if you did that, no one would ever impose that kind of restrictions on your children.
Because if you were truly looking at the development of the children, the first thing you'd say is, well, I don't want to fuck this kid up.
Well, and you have to be an exceptionally enlightened, open-minded person, you know.
Or a comedian.
Or a comedian, or someone, yeah, exactly, who pushes the envelope, right?
Who really...
Who makes a profession out of stepping out of the box or trying to look at things from, you know, a broader perspective.
But if you're a person who, you know, I mean, if you were raised in a strict religious household, chances are your children are going to be raised in that household and you never really look, you know, you never take the blinders off because you know there's all sorts of bad stuff out there and you just don't want to know about it.
One of the things I like to say, I think psychedelics are extremely valuable With respect to, you know, sometimes I talk about faith.
One of the things that's interesting about psychedelics is they don't require faith, right?
I mean, religious belief, religious tenets are usually postulated on this idea that here's a whole bunch of things that you should believe, and there's not a shred of evidence for any of this, but you must have faith, my son, right?
That this is...
Well, why should you have faith?
You know, chances are it's a lie.
I mean, you know, we know that the religions have been scamming us for centuries.
But what do you say to the people, the cynics, the people who would look at the psychedelic experiences and say, okay, you are glorifying and you're over-exaggerating what's essentially a hallucination.
Your visual cortex is being bombarded with these foreign chemicals.
You're seeing things that aren't there.
And all this is is just your brain's need to make something profound out of what's essentially a malfunction.
A malfunction of your thinking, a malfunction of your visuals.
And you've sort of attached all this importance to it after the experience is over.
But to that I would reply that what we call ordinary reality, ordinary consciousness, even consensus reality, is essentially a hallucination.
I mean, right?
The reason drugs work is because we're made of drugs.
And whether or not we're on drugs or not, our brains are creating this reality, which we know does not resemble the real world, whatever that is.
I mean, the instruments of our physics and so on tell us that the world is a quantum world.
It's full of vibration.
It doesn't look anything like this.
A lot of what our brain does is synthesize a hallucination, essentially, create a model of the world that we proceed to live in.
I mean, the world that you and I share and everyone shares, this is a model of the world.
This is a model reality, not the real reality.
Is completely unknowable and will always remain so.
So for people to say, well, you've just, yeah, you've disturbed your brain chemistry in a novel way and you've tuned into a different channel, essentially, but you're still working with a model, whether it's a model of the...
We're all experienced through the lens of a drug or whether it's experienced through the lens of, you know, sober conscious perception.
It's still a biochemical artifact in a sense.
Our brains create this.
We live inside of it, you know, and that's...
So that's what I would say to those people, that it's not that...
There is some kind of objective reality which we're immersed in when we're not on drugs.
It's more that we're on drugs all the time.
Our brain is an organ that happens to churn out drugs, which we call neurotransmitters and hormones, and that's what our brains run on.
So all you do when you take an external drug is you tweak one or more of those sets of receptors that the neurons are talking to, and you get a slightly distorted signal from what we have come to accept as ordinary reality.
There is no ordinary reality, or we don't know what it is.
It's forever unknowable in terms of our subjective experience.
But we have this real need, a lot of people, to discount the things that happen, to discount the vision of the psychedelic experience, the hallucinations, the visuals, the profound impact and the sounds.
Even though those are experiences that you are taking in as an individual, as a human being, as an entity, you're taking those in, they're dismissed.
They're discounted because you can't hit them.
You can't paint them.
There's nothing there.
You have nothing there.
That experience, although significant to you, Well, yeah.
But now, I mean, that's part of the task, I think, is to be able to bring something back from that place.
And people do.
I mean, I think that's a lot of what psychedelic art does and these sort of creative...
It's not that people go out and take psychedelic drugs and never produce anything.
Those experiences influence them profoundly.
And you may not be able to exactly reproduce them, but given the technologies that we have access to, you can come pretty darn close with multimedia technologies and computer graphics and all this stuff.
And it may be that...
I think this technology is only going to get better as we evolve toward it.
Maybe in 10 or 15 years you won't have to take psychedelic drugs because we'll have neurotechnologies that just do the same thing.
Or maybe it is that you take one Psychedelic drug.
You take a capsule and it's a nanomachine that will, on demand, produce any kind of altered state that you want to call up.
That's the scary part, is that it's not just science fiction.
One of the fascinating concepts that Terence had was the concept of the singularity as he saw it, you know, the technological singularity.
A little bit different than the way Kurzweil and a lot of these futurists saw it.
He thought it was very likely going to be a time machine or something along those lines, something that will They'll be created where there's a new technology where time ceases to be linear.
And, you know, in fact, we used to, you know, Terry used to speculate that, you know, at 2012 that the singularity will be Triggered the moment that time travel is invented.
And everyone after that will, of course, want to migrate back to the original moment when time travel was invented.
So suddenly there'll be all these time machines condensing out of nowhere.
No one can even wrap their head around that idea, that infinite Time and distance into the future would all be able to access the moment the first time machine was invented.
My thought about human ingenuity and our constant desire for innovation is that I don't ever see it stopping.
It seems to be a part of what the human animal is and what it does here.
So if someone like, I do not remember his name, the guy out of University of Connecticut, he's the lead time travel expert He's a really fascinating character.
He's like a guy in a Spider-Man book.
Because his father died when he was a young boy, so he became determined to build a time machine to go back and save his father.
But his, Ronald Mallet, his idea, I think, was that once he had really thoroughly researched time travel, he realized that you would never be able to go back before the moment of time machine was invented.
I find it amazing that we've been able to, for the most part, not destroy ourselves with nuclear power, because nuclear power, in a lot of the ways, the biggest impact it has is not just powering cities, but destroying them.
The fact that we've sort of figured out a way to put a cap on that, And really, despite all the conflict in the world, we haven't had a nuclear event like that since the 1940s.
And not only every decision you ever make, if I understand it, it extends to, you know, every collapse of a waveform, every, you know, collision of atoms, every event, every event, no matter how minuscule or insignificant that we're not even aware of proliferates multiple, multiple time frames.
It doesn't make sense.
Obviously, we can't wrap our head around this.
And it may be that we're...
I mean, maybe we're not confined to one of these timelines.
Maybe we're living simultaneously an infinite number of timelines.
I've always said to people, if you don't want to have a psychedelic experience, you are whether you like it or not.
It's called life.
Because if you existed in some sort of a logical continuum of real objective thought and reasoning, and you had to exist in life in today, in the human world in 2012...
You know, these other dimensions that for shamanism and for psychedelics they present as real.
I mean, does the brain dream all those up?
Why are there commonalities between those states, you know, between people?
I mean, you don't have to be fans of Terence and Dennis McKenna to take DMT and have similar experiences, you know, to us.
So I think I just don't think that we really have a definitive way to say that all of what we experience arises from the brain.
It's more that consciousness is built into the structure of space-time in a certain way, and our brains are detectors and processors, much in the way that television is a detector of a signal, Takes in the signal, processes it in a way that's comprehensible, and puts it out there on the screen.
So the ego and the personality and the lifestyle you choose and what have you as you're making your way through this dimension is essentially just clothing that you wear to shield you from the great outdoors of reality.
And that's one of the more profound aspects of the psychedelic experience is the stripping away of that personality and culture and everything and getting to some weird, strange source, getting to this strange thing that exists, this clear thought without all...
For a minute, you get to turn the circuit board over.
Right.
You get to turn it over and see how it's wired.
I think that's one of the...
There's big, useful, interesting things about psychedelics and particularly DMT. DMT just rips the curtain back and you get to see the raw data of experience and how it's everything.
Memories, people you talk to, fragments of songs, just whatever things are swimming around in your head.
You sort of see, they're all going into, you know, through this funnel or something, and it's coming out all taped together some way, and that kind of a coherent picture of reality.
But DMT strips that back.
You get to step, you get to see it from the other side, briefly, how it's working, you know, the reality-generating machine, if you will.
That's what you see on DMT. What are your thoughts on alien abductions and UFO experiences?
Do you think that these are endogenous dumps of DMT? That it's most likely what these people are experiencing is some sort of an overflow or something?
You know, I think that Strassman's work on this where high doses of DMT can, you know, in some people, reliably induce these abduction type encounters.
Well, we know they're not, you know, standing beside a highway in New Mexico and watching a UFO land.
They're in a hospital bed, you know, with an IV installed, but they're having these types of experiences.
It's all about clinical studies and things he did with DMT. Clinical studies with DMT. And Strassman reported that in many of his subjects who were given high doses of DMT, they had experiences that were...
Similar, if not identical, to the classic alien abduction type experiences.
Do you think that the DMT could possibly, I mean, this is complete speculation, but act as a doorway where an actual, real, true entity can come through so these people that are having these UFO abduction experiences, even if they are still lying in their bed, they are actually still having this real experience.
I mean, and if you talk to shamans, people that deliberately induce these states for exactly this reason, to communicate with these non-human intelligences that give them useful information about all kinds of things, I mean, the shamans are just matter of fact about it.
And they'll just say, well, yeah, what did you think it was?
I mean, if I was the cynic, I would say, well, that's obviously your imagination then because it can't concoct anything that doesn't exist or something you wouldn't possibly know.
It doesn't have the resources because it's coming from your own mind.
In other words, Terence or whoever created the time wave theory never defined, these are the criteria that will invalidate this theory, right?
And science depends on In order to qualify as a theory, you have to say, what's going to invalidate it?
What are the criteria that's going to take the foundations out from under this theory?
That either means you have to chuck the theory completely, or you have to modify it so the model fits the data better, right?
And he was never able to, or he never...
And I don't think he was really able to define what would invalidate the theory.
So it's an untestable theory.
So it's not a theory.
It's just an idea.
It's an interesting idea, but it isn't a theory.
It's not something you can disprove.
And so it's...
It's useful as an idea, but in some ways it's not.
I mean, you know, if you want it to be scientific, if you want to call this a theory in the scientific sense, you have to define what's going to disprove it.
When I meant that science can't disprove things, what I meant is they can't disprove really unique events like the idea of a UFO actually existing and then disappearing.
Once it's here and gone, if there's no physical evidence, how can you disprove a unique event like that?
I mean, I always thought that what J. Allen Hynek, the famous UFO researcher, said about UFOs, he said, I don't know if UFOs are real or not, but I know absolutely 100% that UFO experiences are real.
But he was always clear that what he was investigating were UFO experiences because that was the data That he had to work with, you know, and that's absolutely 100% true.
UFO experiences do occur, whether those are...
Confabulations of the mind or whether they're extraterrestrial origin, extradimensional origin.
And one of the more interesting things that Terence said about psilocybin, which was a real mind blower, was, first of all, how closely it relates to normal human neurochemistry.
That psilocybin is like almost exactly the same as chemicals that our own brain produces and very alien in that form.
The form that it exists, whatever the molecule structure of psilocybin is, it's the only similar...
The way it exists, there's not something similar to it, or there's not something like it that exists in the organic world other than our own brain chemistry?
But I think what he was trying to say, that psilocybin is only found in the fungal kingdom, right?
As far as we know, it's never been found in a higher plant, although...
Lots of tryptamines.
DMT is all over the place and a lot of its derivatives, but psilocybin and psilocin do not occur, as far as we know, outside the fungal world, outside the world of mushrooms.
Why that should be?
Hard to say.
Maybe it will be discovered in a higher plant tomorrow or next week, but I kind of doubt it.
I don't want to get too much into the chemistry, but I do think that this touches on another remarkable aspect of our universe, of biological being, which is that these tryptamines, DMT, 5-methoxy-DMT, bufotinine, psilocybin, psilocin, DMT itself is two steps from tryptophan.
Tryptophan is an amino acid that is universal.
It's part of the 20 that go into proteins.
So it's an essential molecule of life, tryptophan is.
The enzymes that convert tryptophan to DMT, there are two primary enzymes, amino acid decarboxylase, aromatic amino acid decarboxylase, and methyltransferase is what they're called.
I don't know if your audience cares about this, but the point is two trivial steps from tryptophan leads to DMT.
Right.
And so DMT...
You know, the biosphere is saturated with DMT. It's not an uncommon chemical at all.
It's found in probably thousands of plants.
It's found in animals.
It's found in fungi.
It's everywhere.
I think it's interesting.
I mean, I don't know what it means except, you know, stepping away from science for a minute, strict science, but thinking maybe this is a kind of a subtle message that nature is trying to Send to the monkeys?
Panspermia is how they believe that amino acids and essential building blocks from life may have traveled here from asteroids and that may be how life is seeded on this planet.
Or, I mean, I suggest in the book, actually people have to read the book because I unpack this.
I actually Have a section in the book called Reflections on Monterey.
And I, trying to Not only unpack it for the reader, but try and look at it myself from the standpoint of four years hence, you know, after the experience and say, what was going on and what makes sense and what might have been going on?
Was it simply two, you know, nerdy guys who went to the Amazon, took too many drugs and had, you know, these experiences and that end of story?
Or was there really something else going on?
And the whole This issue touches on what we were talking about, about the potential evolutionary significance of mushrooms.
And it may be that what we are is a million-year, multi-million-year long biotechnology experiment, essentially, where if a Super technological civilization,
biotechnological civilization with plenty of time on its hands and a certain perspective, if they wanted to take an ecology and see what happened when they seeded these molecules into the ecology, you know, and then watched it unfold, you know, perhaps manipulating the way things unfolded.
It's almost like, you know, they wanted to...
Kind of, I guess, create the conditions where intelligence and consciousness could arise and then see what the effects were in a certain sense.
Something along those lines, you know, where if you...
Seed the ecology with tryptophan and the enzymes, then this thing is going to be all over the place.
And then, you know, and probably predate the appearance of complex nervous systems.
But, you know, we know, for example, that the serotonin receptors are evolutionarily the oldest receptors that we know, the oldest neurotransmitter receptors.
But you yourself, knowing so much about biology, looking at the complex processes that occur on this planet that are completely...
I wouldn't say they're orchestrated by nature...
But just the parasitic relationships, the really complex ones that parasites have, like the aquatic water worm that gets inside of a grasshopper, grows, then convinces the grasshopper to commit suicide so it can be born into the water.
I mean, we know about these weird, crazy relationships that exist.
So why is it so far-fetched to think that there is a galactic, you know, super race or maybe it's, you know.
That infects, you know, complex nervous systems in our ecology that then induces us to, you know, invent culture and language and technology and eventually build starships and get off this butt ball.
I mean, one of Terence's favorite phrases, and I think it's true, we should always remember what J.B.S. Haldane said, you know, the universe is not only stranger than you suppose, it's stranger than you can suppose.
Yeah, I think that ultimately, you know, people say, well, what can we conclude from all this?
And what have you learned from taking psychedelics, you know, for 40 years and all that?
And the answer is kind of disappointing.
It will be disappointing to some people, which is that exactly this.
The world is a marvelous place, much more marvelous than we can imagine.
You know, and we don't know very much.
I mean, our knowledge is so restricted.
And I think that's what you learn after all this time.
And this is what ayahuasca, my main plant teacher, always insists.
Remember, you don't know shit.
Don't get arrogant because you don't know shit.
You just don't know very much.
And so...
It's like, you could say, well, I don't know shit, and I feel really stupid, but it also clears the decks to appreciate things and remind ourselves that we don't know very much, but it clears the decks for learning.
It means there's so much...
Left to be understood and marveled about and thought about.
Now, how long did it take you after La Torreira before you jumped back on the horse?
It seems like if I got smeared across the entire cosmos for a couple weeks and I don't remember how I shit or smoke cigarettes, I might just fucking quit, okay?
But not you.
How much time did you take off before you jumped back on?
Yeah, I mean, I had some worries about it when I went back to it.
But not really, because there were so many other circumstances.
The psychedelic was...
Just a part of it.
A lot of it, the reason it happened was because we set ourselves up into this...
You know, conceptual or I don't know what you call it, cognitive box.
We set ourselves, we painted ourselves into this corner in terms of our predictions about what was going to happen, you know, because it was all about time, right?
A lot of it was about time.
And so when we were leading up to doing the experiment, We thought that, well, the reason all this strange stuff is happening is because a few hours up ahead in the future, we've done the experiment, and it has succeeded.
And so what we're getting is the backwash from the future, like approaching a singularity.
You know, we were getting the backwash from the future, and that's why it's warping reality.
It literally is warping reality as we approach this thing.
So we went into it with the attitude that something had to happen, something physics-shattering, and we were trying to overturn, literally, the laws of physics.
We came into it with the idea that something had to happen, and guess what?
Something happened!
It just wasn't what we predicted would happen.
You just went cuckoo for a couple of weeks.
Yeah, exactly.
But it was more than just cuckoo.
It was this coordinated...
experience of Terence and myself where we were linked and we understood that one person is we were becoming mirror images of each other almost like a photograph and it's negative and one entity was going forward in time and another was going backward in time and I mean, we had a whole framework where it made sense.
Did you have a lot of experiences or any experiences where you saw ancient motifs, whether it was hieroglyphs or...
Egyptian or I've heard people that say they've seen Aramaic or Arab type writing and what seems to be maybe perhaps the experiences of other people that have taken these same sort of psychedelic drugs and that it's a stored collected experience.
I know that was one of the things that Terence believed.
That when you are taking psilocybin, you're not just taking psilocybin, you're sort of conjoining the experiences of everybody who's ever taken that drug ever.
That's the dimension that's real for those people.
And it's just...
I mean, to us, it seems...
Implausible and unlikely.
But to them, it's like it's a part of their everyday reality.
They just accept it.
I mean, it's much more matter-of-fact.
Yes, there are these realms.
There are these entities.
You can get there with ayahuasca.
If you look at the paintings of Pablo Emeringo, for example, or others, you know, I mean, he had this ability to paint that realm as best he recollected it.
But that's a tremendous contribution because he provided a window, you know, into that cosmology.
You can sort of look into that conceptual place without actually taking ayahuasca.
Yeah, when a guy can do that, like Alex Gray especially, some of his images, they appear Egyptian, they appear DMT slash Egyptian.
And I've always wondered, what is that that you're seeing when you're seeing this sort of ancient motif?
It seems, for whatever reason, it seems like a crazy assertion that you're accessing the experiences of all these people that have ever done this drug.
But is it any weirder than cell phones?
Is that any weirder than the ability to Google something?
Is it any weirder than the Hobbit in 3D? I mean, you could say, yeah, you could say, you know, well, it's a similar experience because these mushrooms activate the same receptors in everybody, and we all have a similar brain architecture and all that, and I think that to a certain extent that's part of it, but that's not the whole story.
I mean, again, that comes back to whether, you know, The brain is generating this stuff or whether it's actually, you know, sort of just making the membrane thinner so that you can look at it.
Eating cannabis and getting to the point where you're The way I try to describe it is when you're so high that you feel like the parallel dimension, the neighboring dimension is like a waterfall and you've got your nose touching the water and you're right about to push through the other side, that's when you get in the tank.
There's a moment when you feel like you've eaten too much, like you had to pop around and you're like, this is not a comfortable feeling.
Well, no, I have done it once, but I have not done a big dose.
I haven't done a lot.
That would seem to be a good place for it.
The problem is I have kids.
I don't want to be blasted out of my head in that thing and then have something go wrong and you open the door and reality just hasn't tuned back in yet.
But even just, like I said, by itself, just for relaxation.
But I just never understood why more people didn't want to have that just as a meditation tool, as a tool for completely getting alone with your thoughts and just separating yourself from any of the input of the body.
I mean, I'm sure he would credit cannabis for a lot of that, you know, his inspiration.
What he was doing was essentially what he used to do.
I mean, back before anybody knew about him or us or whatever, back in the Berkeley days in the 60s, he loved nothing more than to get a bunch of people in a room, pass around hash or some kind of really strong pass around hash or some kind of really strong dope, something that would render everybody else completely speechless.
They couldn't say anything and then he would just regale them for hours, you know, and everybody was fascinated and he was totally coherent.
I mean, a lot of people, they smoke a lot of cannabis, they get quiet, right?
I'm one of those.
I can't rap on cannabis very well.
But he just, he could do it.
And then he found not only, you know, if it works for a bedroom full of people on his, you know, in his hippie crash pad on Telegraph Avenue, it'll work for audiences all over the world.
So he turned it into Thank God he did as well because those recordings and the books and the lectures, those experiences changed The entire direction of a lot of people's lives, including mine.
Absolutely mine.
The first time I did DMT, I literally heard him saying something in the DMT trip.
I heard his voice saying something.
It was just...
His impact, I think, is...
It was unbelievably profound, that ability to relay those thoughts in this really compelling way.
I mean, I can't tell you how many gigs I've gone on, where I had to travel or I had to drive, and I just listened to a psychedelic salon, listened to one of the lectures.
So compelling and fascinating, and I think that opens up completely new lines of thinking for a lot of people.
And, you know, it's interesting, The currency that this has, he's still out there.
He's achieved this weird kind of immortality on the net.
What he said, when you think about most of this was early 90s stuff when he was talking about this, but you can put a tape on, and it's just as timely as though it were uttered yesterday.
He has this real feeling for...
The future.
And people come up to me, a lot of young people come up to me and said, everything I learned, I learned from Terrence McKenna.
And it was like, before that, my life was empty and now I understand.
And you look at these people and you say, they couldn't have been more than...
Eight, or seven or eight, when he was at the height of his career.
You know, these people, some of them were in diapers when he was, you know, at the height of his career.
So they discovered him later, somehow, and he still had this impact.
There's a lot of different people that have a lot of different ideas, but for whatever reason, it wasn't compelling.
I think one of the great things that you're doing in this book is you're not sugarcoating anything.
The way you describe your brother is obviously with great love and respect and admiration, but also great honesty.
And I think that's very important.
I think it's really, really important for recognizing his true contributions and recognizing that, like all of us, he's a human being who is experimenting with all these ideas.
And sometimes they weren't correct, but that's the only way you get to those ideas.
They have to sort of evolve and form and you have to keep playing with them.
In the nature of that, in the nature of full disclosure, if there's any glaring errors that he had made that people have either repeated or that they have misinformation because of these glaring errors, what would it be?
Well, when you said earlier that he would say something, and you said, well, that didn't make any sense, and you contradicted what you said earlier, do you have any specific...
He didn't like me to go to his seminars so much because I was the only one that would ever challenge him.
Everyone else is listening in sort of slack-jawed fascination of his uttering these completely wild ideas.
And I was the only one who would really ever get up and say, well, what you said 20 minutes ago doesn't make any sense and it contradicts what you say now.
He would respond with, well, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, right?
And that's a very valuable one because, in fact, culture isn't your friend and a lot of what...
What Terence's point, again, think for yourself.
Don't believe what anybody tells you.
And psychedelics are a challenge to that.
All these people that dismiss the psychedelic experience, as you rightly point out, they haven't had it.
Or if they have, they didn't pay attention.
So...
So their opinions count for nothing.
I mean, they're like the people, you know, they're like the Dutch lens makers who built telescopes, but, you know, refused to look through the telescopes because that was a blasphemous act, right?
week we'll be back tomorrow with the great honey honey band who will be appearing at the end of the world show with doug stanhope joey diaz and myself that's december 21st 2012 at the wolton theater uh like i said i think it was as of the start of this podcast there's about 100 tickets left for that uh this thursday night uh the improv in hollywood they could watch it live on you stream at you stream.tv uh we'll try to do it live If not, it'll be recorded to Vimeo.