Date: 11-25-12
Host: George Knapp
Guests: Dennis J. McKenna, David Paulides
George Knapp welcomed ethno-pharmacologist Dennis McKenna, who has been studying plant hallucinogens for over forty years, and is convinced there are major therapeutic applications of psychedelics. They discussed the groundbreaking work McKenna did with his brother Terence, the great raconteur of wide-reaching philosophical ideas.
In the first hour, former lawman turned investigative journalist, David Paulides, detailed a potential breakthrough in Bigfoot DNA research.
Biography:
Dennis McKenna is an ethno-pharmacologist who has studied plant hallucinogens for over forty years. In 1975 he co-authored the book Invisible Landscape with his brother Terence McKenna. The book was based on their investigations of Amazonian hallucinogens in 1971. He also acted as co-star of his brother's book True Hallucinations, which further described their experiences while in the Amazon. He earned his Master's degree in botany at the University of Hawaii in 1979, and his Doctorate in Botanical Sciences in 1984 from the University of British Columbia. Since that time, he has conducted extensive ethnobotanical fieldwork in the Peruvian, Colombian, and Brazilian Amazon. In 2001 he joined the faculty of the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota. He is a founding board member of the Heffter Research Institute, serves on the Advisory Board of the American Botanical Council, and has been a board member for Botanical Dimensions. In 2012, Dennis released The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss!, a biography of his life's adventures with Terence.
Biography:
David Paulides, a former police investigator, has applied his skills to questioning Bigfoot witnesses. The results he has achieved in gaining access to witnesses and getting detailed information from them is both remarkable and intriguing.
Monday, November 26, 2012
Coast 2 Coast: Dennis McKenna
Friday, July 13, 2012
Terence McKenna: Paul Herbert Collection
Hello all, I am excited to announce that our friend Lorenzo recently obtained a precious box of over 150 Terence McKenna workshop & lecture recordings from Paul Herbert at Bruce Damer and Lorenzo Hagerty’s Beyond 2012 conference held at Esalen from June 15 – 17th 2012. Lorenzo is currently digitizing these tapes and will share this magnificent collection in the order in which Paul recorded them on future episodes of the Psychedelic Salon. He is also providing a photo of each cassette as well as notes and quotations at www.psychedelicsalon.us.
I am including the first 2 tapes here on my blog. Podcast 317 is simply incredible and beautiful. An early 1982 recording of Terence at his best. Of course he never did cease to amaze me, so my enthusiasm could be partially due to the novelty of hearing this recording for the first time but I am certain you will equally enjoy it. He unleashes idea after idea with such elegance and brilliance I can’t really write a description that does it justice.It will take most people many listens to fully appreciate Terence’s work here. So without further ado, here is just the beginning of this amazing gift to our community. Friends please support the Salon however you can to ensure Lorenzo is able to properly host all these, I am certain demand will be high and does this work for the love of it, he deserves our help and then some.
Peace,
EROCx1
Podcast 317 – “New and Old Maps of Hyperspace”
Download: FREE Mp3
PROGRAM NOTES:
This is Tape Number 001 of the Paul Herbert Collection.
Some of the topics covered in this talk:
Two types of shamanism, narcotic and non-narcotic
UFOs and aliens
The end of history – the eschaton
The psychedelic experience
Psilocybin allows dialogue with the Other
Death and afterlife
Dreams
[NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.]
“The central point about the psychedelic experience is the content of the experience. And this has been occluded or obfuscated by the behavioral and statistical and scientific methods that have been brought to bear to study hallucinogenic experience.”
“Experientially there is only one religion, and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.”
“Shamanism, on the other hand, is this world wide, since Paleolithic-times, tradition which says that you must make your own experience the center piece of any model of the world that you build.”
“The content of the dialogue with ‘the Other’ is a content that indicates that man’s horizons are infinitely bright, that death is in fact, well, as Thomas Vaughn put it, ‘the body is the placenta of the soul’”
“Alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything.”
“Psychedelic drugs, especially psilocybin, allow a searchlight to be thrown on these deeper levels of the psyche, as Jung correctly stated. But it is not a museum of archetypes or psychic constructs, as he seemed to assume. It is a frontier of wholeness into which any person, so motivated and so courageous as to wish to do it, can go and leave the mundane plane far behind.”
[Regarding UFO's] “A history-stopping archetype is being released into the skies of this planet, and if we are not careful it will halt all intellectual inquiry in the same way that the Christos archetype halted intellectual inquiry in the Hellenistic Age.”
“But a mature humanity could get into a place where we no longer required these metaphysical spankings from messiahs and flying saucers that come along every thousand years or so to mess up the mess that has been created and try and send people off on another tack. And the way to do this is to look at the abysses that confront man as species and individuals and try to unify them. And I think that psilocybin offers a way out because it allows a dialogue with the overmind. You won’t read about it in “Scientific American” or anywhere else. You will carry it out.”
“Escape into the dream. Escape, a key thing charged against these drugs, that they are for escapists. I think the people who make this charge hardly dare dream to what degree they are escapist.”
“All information is everywhere. Information that is not here is nowhere.”
“We are, in fact, hyperdimentional objects of some sort which cast a shadow into matter, and the shadow in matter is the body. And at death, what happens basically, is that the shadow withdraws, or the thing which cast the shadow withdraws, and metabolism ceases, and matter which had been organized into a dissipative structure in a very localized area, sustaining itself against entropy by cycling material in and degrading it and expelling it, that whole phenomenon ceases, but the thing which ordered it is not affected by that.” [From the point of view of the shamanic tradition.]
“In shamanism and certain yogas, Daoist yoga, claim very clearly that the purpose is to familiarize yourself with this after-death body, in life, and then the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche. You will recognize what is happening. You will know what to do. And you will make the clean break.”
“There is not the Newtonian universe deployed throughout the parsecs and kiliocosms of physical space AND the interior mental universe. They are the same thing.”
“The tryptamine molecule has this unique property of releasing the structured self into the overself.”
“I’m not an abuser. It takes me a long time to assimilate each experience. And I never have lost my respect for it. I mean I really feel dread. It is one of the emotions I always feel as I approach it, because I have no faith that my sails won’t be ripped this time.”
“Now your question about the dialogue. I mean this very literally. It speaks to you. You speak to it. It says things.”
More quotes from this talk may be found in Podcast 267.
Download: FREE Mp3
PROGRAM NOTES:
This is Tape Number 002 of the Paul Herbert Collection.
Some of the topics covered in this talk:
Repression of psychedelic drugs
Element of risk in taking psychedelics
The imagination
Interiorization of the body/exterization of the soul
Death
The importance of psychedelics
Bell’s Theorem
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“I regard [my] degree more or less as a joke because it was self-directed study. They don’t really; there is no degree in shamanism.”
“This [repression of psychedelic drugs] has, in my opinion, held back the Western development of understanding consciousness because quite simply, these states, I do not believe, are accessible by any means other than drugs.”
“There is an element of risk [in using psychedelics]. I never tell people that there isn’t, but I think that the risk is worth it.”
“Psilocybin, tryptamine, is in my opinion the means to eliminating the future by becoming cognizant of the architecture of eternity, which is modulating time and causing history, essentially.”
“The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed. The present cultural crisis on the surface of the planet is caused by the fact that this is not a fitting theater for the exercise of imagination. It wrecks the planet. The planet has its own Eco-systemic dynamics, which are not the dynamics of imagination.”
“A birth is a death. Everything you treasure, and believe in, and love, and relate to is destroyed for you when you leave the womb. And you are launched into another modality, a modality that perhaps you would not have chosen but that you cannot do anything about.”
“There is no knowledge without risk taking.”
“It is slowly becoming understood that the modality of being is the modality of mind.
“Flying saucers are nothing more than miracles, and they occur essentially to bedevil science.”
“The drug may not be toxic, but you may be self-toxic, and you may discover this in the drug experience.”
“I think with the work we do with these drugs we are the earliest pioneers in what over the next 100 years will lead to an understanding of consciousness almost as a thing apart from the monkey body and brain.”
“We are consciousness. We may not always be monkeys.”
So I believe that a technological re-creation of the after-death state is what history pushes toward. And that means a kind of eternal existence where there is an ocean of mind into which one can dissolve and re-form from, but there is also the self, related to the body image but in the imagination. So that we each would become, in a sense, everyone.”
“There can be no turning back. We are either going to change in to this cybernetic, hyperdimentional, hallucinogenic angel, or we are going to destroy ourselves. The opportunity for us to be happy hunters and gatherers integrated into the balance of nature, that fell away 15,000 years ago and cannot be recaptured.”
“It is the people who are ‘far out’ who are gaining advantage in the evolutionary jostling for efficacious strategies.”
“Modernity is a desert, and we are jungle monkeys. And so new evolutionary selective pressures are coming to bear upon the human situation, new ideas are coming to the fore. Psilocybin is a selective filter for this. The wish to go to space is a selective filter for this. Just the wish to know your own mind is a selective filter for this.”
“On these matters of specific fact, like is the mushroom an extraterrestrial and that sort of thing, I haven’t the faintest idea. The mushroom itself is such a mercurial, elusive, Zen sort of personality that I never believe a word it says. I simply entertain its notions and try and sort through them, and I found that to be the most enriching approach to it.”
“Could any symbol be any more appropriate of the ambiguity of human transformation? What mushroom is it that grows at the end of history? Is it Stropharia cubensis, or is it the creation of Edward Teller? This is an unresolved problem.”
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
History Channel: The Stoned Ages
THE STONED AGES explores the history of drugs. From the early cave dwellers who first stumbled upon psychedelic mushrooms to the over 6000-year-old tradition of opium cultivation in the East to a modern pharmaceutical industry with over 24,000 drugs on the market, drugs have played a role in our lives since well before recorded human history.
THE STONED AGES explores the reasons we've used drugs through the ages to heal our bodies and minds, to connect with a higher power, to feel better, for recreation, to escape, for performance enhancement, and even to prolong our lives while considering the devastating consequences that accompany the choice to use certain drugs. This fascinating, fresh, and insightful documentary will ask the question: overall, have drugs done more to help us or hurt us?
Hosted by Dean Norris, THE STONED AGES will journey through the millennia and look in on the greatest civilizations in human history to discover if drugs helped these societies flourish or fail and whether drug use was holy or hedonistic, a savior or a curse. How can drugs that are worshipped in one society be morally reprehensible and often illegal in another? And what causes some good drugs to go bad?
THE STONED AGES will interview the writers, historians, doctors, pharmaceutical reps, religious leaders, policy makers, FDA scientists, DEA representatives, and drug addicts who shape the often conflicting roles that drugs play in our lives today.
Drugs can kill and enslave, heal and provide hope, and alter our consciousness in deeply profound ways. THE STONED AGES will tell the story of how drugs have helped us become who we are.
Monday, June 8, 2009
Trippin' with the Dalai Lama
Based on a true story
Republished with permission from: Undergrowth magazine
written by: DSM-V
The fourth method of awakening [i.e. enlightenment] is through the use of specific herbs. In Sanskrit it is called aushadi... knowledge of the herbs is a closely guarded secret. - Swami Satyananda Sarawati, Kundalini Tantra
There cannot be the slightest doubt that the Hindus and probably the Buddhists of earlier days did regard the taking of psychedelic drugs as part of the wide range of sadhanas which led to ecstasy... The mythological and iconographical corollary to this is, apart from the personification of soma as the quintessence of all mind-affecting beverages, the frequent epithet of oiva as the lord of Herbs (Ausadhisvara). – Agehanada Bharati, The Tantric Tradition
The Dalai Lama story... well, there's not much to it. It might all have been a hallucination really, the eternal play of Lila as if wafts down from the hills of Mount Meru. I am an unreliable narrator at best, dear reader, and you must remember that this was in my psychopuppy stage, when I used to take psychedelics and explore with the Buddhist masters. So Caveat Lector, and don’t try this in your home reality grid.
Anyway, back in '96 when I was caning it on acid I pictured Andrew Cohen, a New York-Bronx Jew who was the famous student of the guru Poonjaji turning into a crypto-lock on the cosmic sex-drive, with a big red button. He was pugnacious, arrogant, and a complete control freak with almost no compassion – so of course I had to control him. You must understand though, that there was never any egoistic motivations. I had to be arrogant to even attempt Satsang on Drugs, but it was research arrogance pure as the driven snow off Mt. Meru. These sessions were never games for amusement. It was all heart-broken dharma desperado with his back against the wall on a planet going to hell in a hand-basket. I meditated with Master Charles, another famous Australian Buddhist, in the late 1990s. All these teachers were caught up in a Satsang-vortex, day in and day out, locked into a pattern. It might be an exquisite pattern, but somewhere on their paths it got to a stage where higher consciousness started to form a barrier around them like an airbag, to stop them going on to the next level of their realization. That's why I liked going to Satsangs on drugs, to get the masters wound up and hallucinating within their Satsang structure.
A Satsang is defined as the “fruit of all religious and devotional practices”, but around many teachers they can be like an eternal departure lounge where you can never get off the ground. How did I fall into this Satsang situation? Oh my God, I'm here and I'm surrounded by all these students and gush gush gush. When will I get a moment's peace to meditate, and all that? They're fucked. So in comes J. Random Psychonaut, who says "I'm going to rescue you. I'm going to pop you out of the spiritual teacher experience, and get you back on your path." Of course, they usually look at you like you're a fucking arrogant shit head. But that's karma, I guess.
Many people think that Buddhism is a force for the greater good in that it holds the template pattern of the prime reality together amongst the wavering sea of vibrational frequencies. And that is true. Buddhism is not a scam. It is a force for greater good, a MGO – Meta Governance Organisation in a way, just as the ACLU is more organised than the citizen field of the USA, and is an “reservoir consciousness” but it’s aims and objectives are by and for the citizen field of less self-organized and clear beings. In teh same way the Tibetan Buddhists are maintaining their own reservoir of consciousness, running their own renegade system in the Matrix. Most of their meditative output is devoted to maintaining it, with a bit left over for some active compassion in the world. But they still work to illuminate souls that come within the confines of their pattern. What most people don't know is that Buddhism, like virtually all of the root religions of the world, has it’s origins with different entheogenic plant catalysts, the somas of antiquity.
Deep connection has always begun with plant sacraments, and then become priestified and purified and controlled... Buddhism by way of plant analogies is like clover, it’s flowers are beautiful but modest, it integrates well with the other plants in the field, all plants in the numinous field feed off the earth of humanity, but buddha-clover is rhizomic is feeds back more nutrients by way of the rhizomes, back into the soil. Now the monks are like the nerds of consciousness with their fingers on the pulse of everything, methodically going about colonising different planes, like franchises. It's a bit like World Vision going to a third world country, but Buddhism is a trans-planar organisation, instead of a trans-national corporation. But they are the most eco-sound of the trans-planar corporations. As above so below, and all that. Buddhism established the franchise here on this plane about two and a half thousand years ago from some other trans-planar corporation of higher consciousness. It’s a self-sustaining hallucination of reality that they’ve forced onto the meta-structure of reality.
So anyway, one day back in '96, when the Dalai Lama visited Melbourne, I hacked the mainframe of the Buddhist Corporation and broke into the head office, straight into the mind of the CEO. The Buddhists were putting on a ten-day Kalachakra initiation, which involved the building of one of their mandalas made entirely from coloured sand. 'Kalachakra' means 'Wheel of Time' and is the name of one of the Buddhist deities which represents particular aspects of the Enlightened. It's pretty much the great tapestry of Buddhism, and by sheer force of will the Dalai Lama leads the monks in firing up the Kalachakra mandala on an astral level, which they then transmit to other Buddhists in the audience according to their lights and how pure they are in their practice.
After many years of intense meditation the Buddhists apperceive the astral in ways similar to the visions psychonauts can experience when on psychedelics and entheogenic plants. Yet drugs have often been referred to as the "left-hand path", as if their tumultuous psychic journeywork is in some way of a lesser quality than gradual mental strengthening. Such shortcuts are not conducive to the path of liberation, Buddhism says. But that's just the dogma of the Buddhist textual discipline – you've got to keep the shareholders in line. Buddhism is like the ocean. Most people are content to stay within the flags and play close to the shores in the tidal puddles. A few people may be capable of swimming out beyond the breakline into the deep swells. The opportunity is all there, but everyone's attention is on the beach. But as is well observed, Psychedelia is not necessarily conducive to discipline, it can be criticized as the muddle path in contradistinction to the middle path of Buddha-Dharma.
DAY ONE
I wasn't there to make a scene, or to interrupt the proceedings at all. I just wanted to see what the whole Buddhist paradigm was like from the psychedelic point of view. I'd pick apart the teachings and size everyone up energetically. I had a $750 ringside ticket and I just caned myself on every psychedelic I could get my hands on for ten days: acid, mushrooms, marijuana... whatever could be found at the time, and there was a bit of a drought on, I must admit. It was pure curiosity – I wanted to put the psychedelic spotlight back on Buddhism. And I kept a strict poker-face all the time – no spasms, no outward signs of loss of motor control were allowed. Diamond point will was needed the whole time to maintain discretion and politeness yet at the same time fierce intent of inquiry.
It’s interesting watching all the Buddhists together at these types of intentional gatherings because it’s all very Old MacDonald Had a Farm… You could judge different types of Buddhists and compare them to different bird species… The Dalai Lama is the big peacock and he’s got his coterie of littler peacocks; and when they go into their thing and start meditating they’re opening up their psychic plumage. And just like the birds their chests get all puffed up and they tweet away. And then the Dalai Lama comes with his beak and pokes around and inspects them, making adjustments here and granting boons there. And there I am, the fox in the psychic chicken coop, and the other monks are trying to figure out where I sit in the cosmic pecking order.
Every form of rank structure exhibits rank abuse, but the Buddhists pattern is the most mellow form of rank abuse. That’s why they stress the compassion, the compassion. As you go up the gradations of refined consciousness you realize it’s a spiritual food chain. Everything feeds on the levels below it, and the Buddhist mainframe is being fed by that consciousness reservoir they’ve been building all these thousands of years, that pirate sub-universe they’ve carved out for themselves on the inner wall of the Godhead.
So the Buddhist monks were there being very competent, rubbing their bellies and patting their heads at the same time while they're firing up the absolute 'biggie' of Buddhism – the Kalachakra mandala, which had a big thanka pattern on it. I waited till the Dalai Lama, the master programmer, was preoccupied flicking some psychic switches. He was vulnerable, so I went in for the kill, into the heart of the Buddhist mainframe. The Dalai Lama saw me coming, of course. Here's a member of the psychedelic ratbaggery, he thought, and I'll put on a show for him. We'll strut our stuff. Game on. He starts to generate his God-masks, and radiates unconditional love of all creatures, angels and demons. He was focussed on his work, not vulnerable, that gave me a window to dive in like Count Zero in Gibson’s Neuromancer.
I'd hack into the Buddhist mainframe one day, and the next day those portals would be locked, and there would be a smirk on the Dalai Lama's face as I tried to get in, only to go whoomp, and slide off his defenses like a fried egg on a frypan. And then I'd have to go around somewhere else and hack in again... They had all these bug fixes, these one day-turnaround bug fixes and they'd keep sealing all the holes. In a way, perhaps, they were just letting me in to do the annual stocktake on their filters and firewalls. I was like this little psychedelic bird on the back on a rhinoceros, picking off the ticks. Like a egg off a teflon frypan. I was impressed! One day turnaround on bug-fixes! Annual audit.
DAY TWO
This all started when I visited the Australian Buddhist Barry (Bazza) Long, he was a local guru. He was a sort of tantric teacher, all man-woman stuff and cosmic yin-yang energies, you know, get your fucking right and everything's right with the universe. That's not true, everything's just right for you behind your white picket fence of your privatised ego-complex. He wasn't actually activating Buddha-nature, or Gandhi-nature, or Noam Chomsky-nature in the students, or any type of practical spirituality. And then one day I thought, Christ, you need to be on drugs to endure this, and bing!
That's how I became a dharma desperado. I felt the fucked-up-ness of the world had forced me to put a) and b) back together, Buddhism and psychedelics. The world was going to hell in a hand basket and the Buddhists apparently couldn't organize their way out of a paper bag on fire. Christianity is clearly a negativity generation engine, but was Buddhism merely an apathy generation mechanism? I considered it strategic psychedelic activism. Unlike baseline politics the psychonautical terra-ist (Latin for Earth, not terror) doesn't conduct assassinations, they perform liberations. You single out strategic points in the reality grid, whether they be politicians, pop-stars or parking ticket inspectors, and you router your psychedelic love-bomb at them when in higher states of consciousness. Bath them in love, and stand back to watch the explosion.
Back in '96 I spent six days with Gangaji on acid. It was a six-day residential retreat and I had, I don't know, about 21 trips, a big bag of hash and not enough bulbs. Gangaji and Andrew Cohen are sort of brother-sister teachers. They both came under the lineage of Poonjaji and were sort of roughly students at the same time. But they fought like cats and dogs over their approach to things. I kept trying to fling Gangaji out of her Satsang trap when I was loaded up and firing possible Satsang structures. That was the name of the game, as a force of intentionality. Gangaji seemed to clock on to what I was doing, but you know, I was wearing my blue meditation shawl and I was immaculately behaved. I don't flirt with the Dharma-babes, and that sort of thing, I kept it very straight. She knew I wasn't there to be disruptive, so she kept the Satsang going but she had to juggle two balls at the same time, if you will. It was pure research arrogance on my part, but I just decided to do it. It wasn't as if I had any qualifications in my Curriculum Vitae to trip out spiritual teachers.
DAY THREE
So I started to tow the line a bit, and while on my psychedelic journey I entertained the idea of the relationship between Lord Buddha and Lord Mara, his ancient Nemesis. Mara was the one who came and tempted Buddha while he was under the Bodhi tree by firing off all the hallucinations, and tried to distract him from his path of liberation. And Lord Mara has this network of God energies he feeds on. The big thing about Buddhism is that there are no creator Gods, it's all a five-fold interdependent arising of different yin-yang attributes. Well, that's not true, there are creator Gods, but, well..., oh look, it gets complicated...
One could say that Buddhism is Lord Mara's greatest creation, his greatest indulgence. This is because even though they've achieved so much, Buddhists are still limited. They're so far against the wall they're in love with it, they want to know every nook and cranny of it. They want to know everything that's going on in consciousness because they're meta-policemen. There's a lot of nasty consciousness going down out there and the Buddhists want to know the causation of everything. They're the Nerds of Numinousity, Anorak wearing Godspotters.
So I stuck to the psychedelic communication level, picking away at them on the astral with my own inquiries. One shouldn't be able to ask these questions within orthodox Buddhism; I shouldn't be able to hack into the mainframe; I shouldn't be able to do anything. But when you're on drugs there's no rules anymore. Maybe I'm just hallucinating but I'm having fun.
DAY FIVE
Day Five, they decided to pull a practical joke on me. There was no earthly reason why I had to get up in the middle of these proceedings. I had five trips coming on strong and I'd taken care of the plumbing before liftoff. Yet I suddenly felt like I had to go to the toilet, and started crossing my legs and holding my bladder... Jesus, I really had to go to the toilet! But I hadn't even drunk anything in the last six hours, I thought to myself.
Then I looked over to the senior monks, and they were all smirking, and they sent this thoughtform out: hardy har har.
So I had to get up, dressed in black like something out of the Matrix, whacked on drugs, and discretely walk up all these aisles whilst facing off all these Buddhists to go to the toilet. But that was the worst they did to me really, and after that I came and sat back down. Not too bad, considering... They'd clocked on quickly that I had no interest in interfering with their meditations, but even still some of the purists were horrified by my attempts to traverse their spaces whilst on hallucinogens. So I'd almost peed my pants in front of the Dalai Lama whilst on acid, but that was only a gentle slap. We can hack into you, too, mate, they were saying.
After days of staring at it on acid, the intelligence at the heart of the kalachakra mandala came out as an eye, slowly looking around. And then it clocked on to me. Then the Dalai Lama looked at it and they both looked at me, and this thoughtform came at me, "who does this punk think he is?"
I am a simple traverser of the psychedelic planes, I pulsed back. No not, really. I don't know, don't ask me, I beamed at them sheepishly. I'm just on drugs.
DAY SIX
About Day Six... I got a transmission from the Dalai Lama. I'd been caning it every day, of course, in the front row with the good monks while the Dalai Lama did his work in front of us and on the astral. And on this day he was looking very grim at one stage and then he suddenly cracked into a smile and said: "Most unorthodox, most unorthodox." Then he whipped out this pulsating ball of yin-yang energy and just huuurrled it at me. It went ker-plonk, right into my chest, a recursive fractal ball of energy... and I did go a little bit spastic. He got right through my shields, and there were a few twitches... just a few twitches before the poker face cam back on.
It was like getting a processor upgrade on the computer. I'd just jumped from a 486 processor to a Pentium as he infected me with his psychic virus. I still don't know to this day what it did inside me; but he got his hooks into me. And make no mistake – from within the Buddhist mainframe the Dalai Lama looks like Schwarzenegger. Rippling muscles. He looks like a harmless, cheeky little man on the outside, but his avatar on the astral is buff, very buff. Extremely buff.
And suddenly some discarnate entity starts to appear above him, all teeth and claw and tentacles, multiple eyes and bright volcanic light as it manifested. It was like a star with teeth, Old Gods from the Cthulhu mythos or a Kraken from the ocean. It started to form above the Dalai Lama's right shoulder and grow bigger and bigger and bigger. The Dalai Lama remained calm, reading his Pali, his Tibetan prayer book, going chunka chunka chunk as he fired up the mandala. So in the astral I sort of tap the Dalai Lama on the shoulder and he glanced up. Hey buddy, look behind you!
I start communicating with the entity and it’s then that I notice he has all these astral puppet strings going into the Dalai Lama, some right up into his bum. If you did a psychic audit on our bums you’d find that all the control strings come through there. It's the last place you'd look, so the entities always go there. Anyway, this entity is sniggering. Now you've got to remember that the Dalai Lama is Jainist in his approach to the sanctity of life forms. He won't even kill a mosquito, he has to keep shooing them away. On a psychic level, when an entity like the one here starts to devour him into the cosmic ecology, he can't kill it. He has to have boundaries, but he can't kill even malevolent deities. He has to see through their God masks, and this one was a very profound God mask, sniggering quite a lot as it watched us.
You may think I would have jumped into the psychic fire and wrestled the entity to the ground, saving the Dalai Lama and getting some fine Buddhist boy-scout medals for my actions. But no. These are the big boys, and they know what they're doing. But what they know and what they act upon are two different things. Anyway, this might be a test – this might be something they do to psychonautical terra-ists like me all the time. It's pretty wild at the top levels of the Buddhist world, and clearly caution was needed.
Suddenly the Dalai Lama just catches the entity and compresses it. He doesn't let it come into this dimension, he just seals off that portal it came through in front of my eyes. He's onto it.
The Dalailamanator in action.
DAY EIGHT
Towards the end of the proceedings I started to get paranoid, thinking the monks were ganging up on me with the past Buddhist masters I'd dabbled with in the astral. I was having a flashback to an earlier session with Andrew Cohen, and remember, the man has almost no compassion. He goes into his Satsang and starts to build up his God masks, and most of it comes across as demonic. One of the themes that goes through his teachings is absolute unconditional love, and one logical consequence of that is unconditional love of demonic nature. I started to feel like I was in a psychedelic Vietnam... But thoughts of surrender were for weaker soldiers.
It started slipping into pure virtuality as I faced off against Cohen and tried to get him to remember that he was an intelligent being on the cosmic crypto-lock sex drive, and I was going to activate him so we could reboot the universe. As I said, I was in a psychopuppy stage. He was intrigued, you know, like he hadn't visited these aspects of consciousness before. Let's cane it, see what happens. So I routed psychedelic energy at him and he loved it. It wasn't a psychedelic attack, per se, just a signal he could choose to tune in on. And he loved it. I met him later in a coffee shop and we shook hands and he said "It's all good sport, isn't it?" But he hasn't come back to Australia since '97, he's in no rush, I'll tell you that.
So anyway, there I was meditating, begrudgingly, do I have to do this all by my fucking self, I wondered. Jesus Christ. DL was going through the part of the ritual where the dorje, you know, the lightning bolt – it looks like four infinity symbols stitched together– is joined by the bell, the tantric bell. And as he starts to sacralise the experience he rings the bell, ding-da-ding-da-ding, he shakes the dorje, the lightning bolt… That’s usually where it stops, but this time he found himself shaking two extra things. And he looked up in surprise at that. This is a ritual he’s been doing for centuries, ritual after ritual in reincarnation after reincarnation. Chonk. Chonk chonk. Chonk chonk, with the dorje. And now the pattern had been broken.
One of the things he was holding that broke the pattern was a Tripping Manual I had written some years previously. I’ve got no idea how my Tripping Manual got up there on stage at the altar, but it was there and he was shaking it. And he was seeing how manipulation of it could shape the fabric of reality. And then he shook the other thing, which was the Ohm system, and he saw how that too, changed the fabric of reality. Now you must remember: the Buddhists are the Prime Pattern Holders in equilibrium with Lord Mara. The Tripping manual is a textual psychedelic, The AUM-OHM system is a organizational psychedelic.
After he’s shaken both of them he glances over precisely at me, as if to say, what are you messing around with here? I pulsed back, that the world was going to Hell in a hand basket and you Buddhists are apparently incapable of moderating the process to stop it. So I’ve developed this text as a non-chemical hallucinogen catalyst. A psychedelic made out of text, and a psychedelic made out of the Ohm system, of pure information.
It was then that I felt these two gigantic cobra fangs stick themselves in either side of my neck. And then this sort of astronaut mask went zooonk over my head like a bank-safe door shutting. I was in the astral Cone of Silence, in the deep, deep end of the eschatological shit. I don’t know what happened to that helmet; I’ve probably still got it on to this day for all I know.
DAY TEN
Part of the $750 ringside ticket I had bought enabled me to press the flesh and meet the Dalai Lama at the end of the Kalachakra initiation at some private sponsors gig at a swanky hotel. I was in crisis mode by this stage because I wanted to meet the Dalai Lama and shake his hand on mushrooms as a final cheerio gesture, but I'd run out of mushrooms, of course. They'd been carefully deployed during the final stages of the Kalachakra initiation, and all I had left was a very dubious trip and a joint. The only other thing left in the altered states pantry was an Ecstasy tablet.
So I dropped my disco biscuit and the rest. After ten days of caning it all the drugs were the same by then. It was just another generic psychedelic, plonk. There wasn't any love or heart opening; I wasn't really feeling anything but bent, really, whacked. But I was in my merchant banker's suit and I was the best dressed person in the room. And this was the inner sanctum; these were all the serious students, the devotees and senior monks. I was the only one in the room on drugs, I guarantee you that without a doubt. Not whacked, ripped, twisted, bent, ripped and twisted, but nothing special. I was rallying the flag for the psychedelic embassy and all my diplomatic credentials were unauthorized! As Noam Chomsky might say.
You had to give mandala prayer offerings to the Dalai Lama, and as you remember, I was big on the causal relationship between Lord Mara and Buddha at the time. So my offering happened to be a little Catholic plaster rendition face cast of Jesus. I painted it up and one eye was the normal glowing white, and the other eye was a sort of red yin-yang eye. And that was meant to be Lord Buddha and Lord Mara. I passed the bodyguard test, and they were very clued in bodyguards, able to read the energy fields in the psychic ether. They all smiled at me and let me pass, and I gave the plaster cast Jesus to the Dalai Lama and shook his hand.
Just a shake, no agenda, no psychedelic spin doctoring. The Dalai Lama just smiled and gave me the white ceremonial scarf, placing it around my neck. But as soon as the senior students clocked on to what I was doing, this Catholic image of Jesus with one demonic eye and one normal eye, they became enraged. A wave of righteous anger and hate rose of them and seared towards me. That someone would dare do this to the Dalai Lama, they seethed. But there was nothing they could do. No spin doctoring, no winks or nudges nor secret masonic handshakes, no “I know, you know etc” just formal politeness and minimum energetic imprinting, anything else would have been declasse and infra-dig, this was closure, not competition.
The Dalai Lama talked, and meditated, and he had this huge mandala with 12 interlocking levels, like a psychedelic doormat. So I focused on that, and on him and together we both got the energy field moving within the mandala. And then I clocked him clocking on to me and I realized: this is the relationship between Buddhism and Psychedelia. That neither the left-hand nor right-hand path has all the goods, in fact all the goods only comes together when you put psychedelics in the context of Buddhism.
And you know what’s funny? The day the Dalai Lama left town, the drug drought broke, and you could score acid again everywhere. I wish I could say the same about the enlightenment.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Dr. David Hillman interview: Author of The Chemical Muse
From: gnostic media podcast #23
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Today’s guest is Dr. David Hillman the author of The Chemical Muse – Drug Use and the Roots of Western Civilization.
Is Western Civilization built on ancient Roman and Greek use drugs? How available were drugs in Classical times? Have the ancient texts been translated so that references to drugs and there recreational use have been intentionally omitted or obfuscated? The generally accepted theory by most Classical scholars is that drugs were not used at all, except maybe for medication. But is that the truth?
Dr. Hillman has spent several years studying the original texts to find out what they really say. And what do they say? It appears that the ancient philosophers, poets and thinkers did most of their thinking under the influence of many different types of psychotropic drugs – and combinations thereof.
D.C.A. Hillman earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in Classics and an M.S. in Bacteriology from the University of Wisconsin. "The Chemical Muse: Drug Use and the Roots of Western Civilization" is the result of his doctoral research on ancient pharmacy. He believes in using an interdisciplinary approach to history as well as the sciences. As a molecular biologist trained to read Greek and Latin, he favors a scientific approach to the examination of ancient primary sources. He also believes in looking at Classical texts without allowing post-Classical (Christian) linguistic and cultural influences to alter the sense of the original languages. He appeared in the March edition of Reason Magazine, in an interview with Mike Riggs (http://www.reason.com/news/show/131409.html). He lives in Madison, Wisconsin with his family, where he continues his research and writing.
http://www.chemicalmuse.com/
Friday, November 7, 2008
Jan Irvin: Announcing The Gnostic Media Podcast & The Holy Mushroom!
I would like to share with you an excellent new Podcast hosted by Jan Irvin of Gnostic Media. Jan is one of the researchers and producers who brought us The Pharmacratic Inquisition and authors of AstroTheology & Shamanism.
He is also the author of the recently released book:
The Holy Mushroom
Evidence of Mushrooms in Judeo-Christianity:
A critical re-evaluation of the schism between John M. Allegro and R. Gordon Wasson over the theory on the entheogenic origins of Christianity presented in The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.
The Gnostic Media Podcast!
Episode #001 is a recording he did back in April of this year, 2008. He went with Richard Andrew Grove of 8thestate media and Paul Verge of Divergent Films to the home of pioneering entheogenic researcher, Professor Carl A. P. Ruck of Boston University. Professor Ruck co-authored Persephone’s Quest with Gordon Wasson, he also co-authored Apples of Apollo with Clark Heinrich and Dr. Blaise Staples. He’s the author of the book Sacred Mushrooms of the Goddess, Secrets of Eleusis, and more recently he co-authored The Hidden World, Survival of Pagan Shamanic Themes in European Fairytales. This episode features the entheogenic rites of the Eleusinian mysteries, John Marco Allegro’s research in The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, and Ruck’s upcoming books.
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Episode #002 features an interview Professor John Rush regarding his new book Failed God: Fractured Myth in a Fragile World. This is the first academic book since the publication of John Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970) that argues Allegro was correct - and provides ample support for the mushroom foundations of Judeo-Christianity.
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Episode #003 features an interview with my friend & author Dr. Martin Ball, host of the Entheogenic Evolution podcast series. They discuss the spiritual use of entheogens, especially mushrooms and Salvia Divinorum, as well as religious vs. spiritual freedom. Do you think you have religious freedom?
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Saturday, December 8, 2007
The oldest Representations of Hallucinogenic Mushrooms in the World
Giorgio Samorini
Integration, vol. 2/3, pp. 69-78, 1992
originally appeared in: Integration no. 2&3, 1992, 69-78
Copyright by author and org. publishers.
Rock paintings and incisions of the prehistoric periods are to be found all over the world, and serve as a testimony to the pre-literate history of human cultures. Rock art, the first permanent form of visual communication known to man, the same art which led to the invention of writing, goes back almost to the origins of mankind. In fact, in Tanzania, as in Australia, there are rock paintings which it would appear go back 40,000 years and more (Anati,1989).
Since most of the works of rock art were, or were related to, initiation rites, or were part of religious practice and its context, the idea that these works should be associated with the use of hallucinogenic vegetals (as has already been put forward for some specific cases on the basis of ethnographic and ethnobotanical data) comes as no surprise. This use, where it arises, is historically associated with controlled rituals involving social groups of varying dimensions. It is perhaps not a chance occurrence that the areas where examples of rock art are to be found — areas in which it is most often asserted that the use of hallucinogens might have taken place, on the basis of the scenes represented or on the basis of the consideration that this practice might have served as a source of inspiration — are also the areas where the most famous examples are to be found in, terms of imagination, mythological significance and polychromy.
We might consider, for example, the works of archeological (or rather "archeo-ethno-botanical") interest in the easternmost areas of Siberia, within the Arctic Circle, on the banks of the Pegtymel River. An extensive petroglyphic area was found there dating back to the local neolithic period. Among these works, we find mushroom gatherers (Dikov, 1971). In some cases we find females wearing long and ornate "ear-rings" and an enormous mushroom on their heads, figures with the stance of people trying to keep their balance. The stocky form and the decoration on the mushroom lead one to suppose these mushrooms are Amanita muscaria (Fly-Agaric), the hallucinogenic mushroom most often associated with shaman practices in Euro—Asia and N. America (Wasson, 1979). Mushroom motifs have also been found in the petroglyphs of the prehistoric settlements of the Kamchatka peninsula on the banks of Lake Ushokovo (Dikov, 1979). The paleolithic culture of Ushokovo (protoeskimoleuts) belongs to the group of peoples who gave birth to the various paleo-eskimo cultures of N. America (2nd Millenium B. C.). It is to be imagined that these protoeskimoleuts belong to the peoples who contained within their culture, in embryo form, "protoshaman" religious practices.
In California, the rock art of the regions inhabited by the Chumash and Yokut, a polychromic manner of painting — particularly evident during the stylistic phase known as the "Santa Barbara Painted Style" — has been associated with the "toloache" cult centered around "Jimsonweed" (a hallucinogenic plant of the Datura genus) known to have been used by a number of Californian and Mexican Indian tribes (Campbell, 1965:63-64; Wellmann, 1978 and 1981). Apparently, the first examples of Chumash rock art date back to 5.000 years ago (Hyder & Oliver, 1983).
The impressive Pecos River paintings in Texas have also been associated with the "mescal" cult (Sophora secundiflora, hallucinogenic beans of which were used during rites of initiation on the part of the Indian tribes of the region) (Howard, 1957). Furst (1986) affirms that the mescal cult goes back 10.000 years, which is to say back to the Paleo-Indian Hunters Period at the end of the Pleistocene period. Archeological excavations carried out in the areas where paintings are to be found reveal mescal seeds which go back to 8.000 B. C, when Carbon-14 dated. Peyote (Lophophora williamsii) has also been found during some of these excavations (Campbell, 1958).
An interesting and quite explicit use of "cohoba", a hallucinogenic snuff taken from the Anadenanthera peregrina tree has been documented among the peoples of the Borbon Caves art in the Dominican Republic (Pagan Perdomo, 1978). This art is probably an example of the Late Antillian Culture of the Tainos and goes back to a period shortly before the arrival of the Spaniards. In this painting, the subject of inhalation of cohoba — by means of cane pipes — is repeatedly represented (Franch, 1982).
The use of hallucinogens as a significant source of inspiration has also been associated with Peruvian rock art. The rock art in this case is based on incisions on rocks, as can be seen in the Rio Chinchipe works in the north of Peru, probably influenced by the use of ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis spp. & allies) (Andritzky, 1989: 55-57). That this is an ancient practice is confirmed by archeological findings (Naranjo, 1986). Also in the rock art of Samanga, the mountainous region of the province of Ayabaca (Piura), among the petroglyphs, we will find figures which have been interpreted as images of San Pedro (Trichocereus pachanoi), the hallucinogenic cactus still used today in the north of Peru and in Ecuador during shaman healing rites (Polia, 1987 and 1988).
Recently it has even been put forward that even the more ancient paleolithic art of the Franco-Canthabric cave-sanctuaries were influenced by altered states of consciousness procured by various methods, among which the use of hallucinogens (Lewis-Williams & Dowson, 1988). The "psychograms" of the paleolithic period, a series of aniconic graphemes (points, vertical lines, circles, zig-zags, lozenges etc.) which, together with zoomorphic images, cover the walls of the European paleolithic caves, could be considered as the fruit of entoptic, phosphenic or hallucinatory states, typical sensorial phenomena pertaining to the field of altered states of consciousness, as might be gathered from Reichel-Dolmatoff’s well-known research into the Tukano of the Amazon (1978: 43-47). Furthermore, natural changes in consciousness due to prolonged sensorial isolation have already been noted. These conditions can be determined in the deep paleolithic caves. Even though the "neuropsychological model" put forward by Lewis-Williams & Dowson is not sufficient on its own to interpret that complex phenomenom which is paleolithic art, this model at least paves the way to supposing that mind-altering factors may have contributed to a prehistoric will-to-art.
At this point, we should remember Kaplan’s (1975) theory that mushrooms are represented in the Swedish cave art of the long Scandinavian Bronze Age.
It should also be pointed out that the explicit representation of psychotropic vegetals, as sacred objects (and therefore subject to taboo), is rare and the few cases of explicit representation make up but a small part of prehistoric art, as sacred art, associated with the use of hallucinogens. We must consider that, generally speaking, sacred cult objects will not be represented and that it is more than likely that these will be hidden behind symbolic devices, also of a graphic nature, whose meaning is indeed beyond us.
Further evidence in support of the idea that the relationship between Man and hallucinogens — in this case mushrooms is indeed an ancient one comes from the ancient populations of the Sahara desert who inhabited this vast area when it was still covered with an extensive layer of vegetation (Samorini, 1989). The archeological findings consist in prehistoric paintings which the author personally had the opportunity to observe during two visits to Tassilli in Algeria. This could be the most ancient ethno-mycological finding up to the present day, which goes back to the so-called "Round Heads" Period (i.e. 9.000 – 7.000 years ago). The centre of this style is Tassili, but examples are also to be found at Tadrart Acacus (Libya), Ennedi (Chad) and, to a lesser extent, at Jebel Uweinat (Egypt) (Muzzolini, 1986:173-175).
Central Saharan rock art, apart from extensive concentrations of incisions, near the sites of ancient rivers, and rock-shelter paintings among the large promontories or high plateau which reach an altitude of some 2,000 metres, cover a period of 12,000 years, generally divided in 5 periods: the "Bubalus antiquus" Period, the works of which were produced by the Early Hunters at the end of the Pleistocene period (10.000 – 7.000 years B. C.) — characterized by representations of large wild animals (Mori, 1974); the "Round Heads" Period, in turn divided into various phases and styles, associated with the epipaleolithic populations of the Early Gatherers (7.000 – 5.000 years B. C.), whose works of fantasy have quite rightly become world famous; the "Bovidian" or "Pastoral" Period (starting 5.000 years B. C.), a population of animal herders and breeders whose art is predominantly concentrated on these activities and, after these, the "Horse" Period and, lastly, the "Camel" Period, the art works of which are stereotyped and of a lower quality.
Some rock art experts have already produced evidence supporting the idea that the art of the Round Head Period could be influenced by ecstatic or hallucinogenic states. According to Anati (1989: 187), this art is produced by the Early Gatherers during the end of Pleistocene and the beginning of Holecene periods. Analogous works dating back nearly to the same period are to be found in various sites around the world (Sahara Desert, Tanzania, Texas, Mexico etc.). These areas were later to become arid or semi-arid when the lakes and rivers dried up. From the many works of art these peoples have left us we learn what were gatherers of wild vegetal foods: "people who lived in a sort of garden of Eden and who used mind-altering substances". Sansoni too (1980) is of the opinion that "it might be that (the works of art of the Round Heads Period) are the works of normal consciousness or the results of particular ecstatic states associated with dance or the use of hallucinogenic substances -The context, or rather the "motivations" behind Round Heads art, just as with all the other periods of Sahara rock art, are generally of a religious and, perhaps, initiatory nature. Fabrizio Mori, discussing Acacus, stressed "the close relationship which there must have been between the painter and that figure so typical in all prehistoric societies whose main role is that of mediator between earth and sky: the wizard-priest" (Mori, 1975). According to Henri Lohte, the discoverer of the Tassili frescoes, "it seems evident that these painted cavities were secret sanctuaries" (Lhote, 1968).
Images of enormous mythological beings of human or animal form, side by side with a host of small horned and feathered beings in dancing stance cover the rock shelters of which there are very many on the high plateau of the Sahara which in some areas are so interconnected as to form true "citadels" with streets, squares and terraces.
One of the most important scenes is to be found in the Tin-Tazarift rock art site, at Tassili, in which we find a series of masked figures in line and hieratically dressed or dressed as dancers surrounded by long and lively festoons of geometrical designs of different kinds. Each dancer holds a mushroom-like object in the right hand and, even more surprising, two parallel lines come out of this object to reach the central part of the head of the dancer, the area of the roots of the two horns. This double line could signify an indirect association or non-material fluid passing from the object held in the right hand and the mind. This interpretation would coincide with the mushroom interpretation if we bear in mind the universal mental value induced by hallucinogenic mushrooms and vegetals, which is often of a mystical and spiritual nature (Dobkin de Rios, 1984:194). It would seem that these lines — in themselves an ideogram which represents something non-material in ancient art — represent the effect that the mushroom has on the human mind. In the various scenes presented, a series of figurative constants lead us to imagine an accompanying conceptual structure associated with the ethno-mycological cult described here.
Matalem-Amazar / In-Aouanrhat
Thus, these two figures could be interpreted as images of the "spirit of the mushroom", known to exist in other cultures characterized by the use of a mushroom or other psychotropic vegetals.
In the same Tin-Abouteka scene, yet another remarkable image could be explained in the light of ethno-mycological enquiry. In the middle we find an anthropomorphous figure traced only by an outline. The image is not complete and the body is bending; it probably also has a bow. Behind this figure, we find two mushrooms which seem to be positioned as though they were coming out from behind the anthropomorphs.
If the mushrooms in question are those which grow in dung, the association between these mushrooms and the rear of the figure may not be purely casual. It is known that many psychotropic mushrooms (above all, Psilocybe and Panaeolus genera) live in dung of certain quadrupeds and in particular bovines, cervides and equines. This specific ecological phenomenom cannot but have been taken into account with regard to the sacramental use of psychotropic mushrooms, leading to the creation of mystico-religious relations between the mushroom and the animal which produces its natural habitat. Furthermore, the dung left by herds of quadrupeds were important clues for prehistoric hunters on the lookout for game, and the deepening of such skatological knowledge probably goes back to the paleolithic period (the long period of the hunter of large game). Thus we have a further argument in favour of the version of events that would have it that there have been mythical associations, with religious interpretations, on different occasions, between the (sacred) animal and the hallucinogenic mushroom. The sacred deer in the Mesoamerican cultures and the cow in Indian Hindu culture (the dung of which provides a habitat for Psilocybe cubensis, a powerful hallucinogen still used today) could be interpreted in this zoo-skatological manner (Wasson, 1986:44; Furst, 1974; Samorini, 1988).
In a painting at Jabbaren — one of the most richly endowed Tassili sites — there are at least 5 people portrayed in a row kneeling with their arms held up before them in front of three figures two of which are clearly anthropomorphous. It could be a scene of adoration in which the three figures would represent divinities or mythological figures. The two anthropomorphous figures have large horns while the upper portion of the third figure, behind them, is shaped like a large mushroom. If the scene is indeed a scene of adoration, it is an important testimonial as to Round Heads mystico-religious beliefs. This scene would thus be the representation of a "Holy Trinity" illustrated by a precise iconography. It is worth bearing in mind the fact that the upper part of one of the "trinity" figures in the adoration scene is mushroom-shaped. It could be related to the iconographic figure at Aouanrhat and Matalem-Amazar described above.
But the more or less anthropomorphous figures with mushroom-shaped heads are to be found repeatedly in Round Head art, some with "hat-heads" of umboned or papillate form which on two occasions are of a bluish colour while others carry a leaf or a small branch.
This new piece in the ethno-mycological puzzle is even more significant if we consider it from the point of view of research into the use of hallucinogens in the immense African continent. Some progress has been made over the last few years as regards the study of this problem (see the work of e.g., Emboden, 1989; Hargreaves, 1986; Lehman & Mihalyi, 1982; Monfouga-Brousta, 1976; Wagner, 1991; Winkelman & Dobkin de Rios, 1989). Africa — both because of an ignorance of the facts which has continued up to the present day and because of the wealth and extreme old age of the indigenous "animist" religions — has still much to tell us concerning the human use of hallucinogens and the origins of such practice.
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