"McKenna - Jun 15 1992" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKenna Terence)

For instance, take the case of dimethyltryptamine, DMT. This is the most powerful psychedelic in existence. It only lasts two or three minutes. This most powerful of all psychedelics we naturally elaborate in our own brains. This is a curious fact. It means that psychedelics, to be what we call 'powerful' or 'overwhelming', are not chemically alien to exotic to the brain, but they are rather very familiar and very much like things already present in the brain. And when you smoke DMT the entire world is replaced in about 30 seconds with something completely impossible to anticipate and utterly astonishing, utterly astonishing, I mean the character of the experience is almost that of pure astonishment. I mean, people have said to me 'Can you die from smoking DMT?' Well, the truthful answer is 'Yes, by astonishment'. Death by astonishment is a real problem here and this is the rarest of all emotions. I mean, when was the last time you were astounded, you know, struck speechless with amazement? We have these phrases in our language 'struck speechless with amazement', but if it happens once or twice in your life I dare say you'll remember it until they lower the box. Well, DMT delivers this on demand. Well, what is so astonishing about it? Nothing less than breaking into an inhabited elf nest of self-transforming machine creatures who are squealing and squeaking in a visible glossolalia that falls like rain on the interior landscape. There isn't even ordinary space and time -- this occurs 30 seconds after availing yourself of this compound and you are restored to normalcy eight minutes later. It means these things are not far away, it is not destructive, it is not inimical to the organism, it simply is suppressed by culture. We don't understand how enclosed we are by the prisons of a limited and scientific language. True weirdness is raging just outside the confines of the cultural paradigm which is trying to reassure us 'Oh, it's all very humdrum and all runs down into entropy and I shouldn't worry about it if I were you'. This is not, in fact, the case. However, I digress.

Q: ??

TM: By the New Age?

Q: Yes.

TM: Well, I hope I didn't come off as terribly hostile, I'm sort of light-heartedly critical is where we're shooting for here.

Q: ??

TM: Oh, I'm sorry, yes. The question was 'Given my view of the New Age, what do I make of the appropriation of shamanism by the New Age and its marketing?' Well, if it's non-psychedelic I absolutely deplore it. I mean, I'm not here to name names, but I'll assure you the major marketers of non-psychedelic shamanism were turned on to the power of shamanism by their experiences with psychedelics and I take a very hard-core position on this just to infuriate people. I really don't believe there's any other way you can get there. I mean these yogic states and states induced by starvation, flagellation, celibacy -- all these tremendously pleasant methods -- are not to be compared to the psychedelic state. I don't know what those people are talking about. One of the things that concerns me is, people say 'Well, this is a spiritual path and you're a spiritual teacher', and so forth and so on -- no, I am not a spiritual teacher and anyone familiar with my moral behaviour can assure you of that. I don't know whether this has anything whatsoever to do with the spiritual quest as ordinarily conceived. My approach to it is it's a phenomenon of some sort that confounds our notion of reality. The thing which got me started on my travels and my career writing about all this was I had been very keen on Carl Jung and all that business and had been raised Catholic, and so when I smoked DMT I had the expectation that the most far-out thing that would happen, that could indeed happen, would be a kind of revelation of the Jungian archetype, the great round dance of the archetypes would be made visible. Well what was completely dumbfounding, was there was no relationship to the DMT flash, to the art history of the species. Our art doesn't hint of these dimensions, very aptly, and yet this is available to all of us. It's so suppressed that it's not even in the human unconscious. It's been suppressed below the level of the human unconscious. It's as though it's a lost world, a parallel continuum, and if you have access to this lost world, this parallel continuum, it would never enter your mind to invent mathematics, government, religion, all of these things, because you are in the moment, you are at peace with yourself and your community, and this is something that we have to make our way back to, because the disequilibrium of history has turned rather rough and ugly here, post-World War II.

Q: ??

TM: Thank you for taking your turn, you're next. Vitamin K, let me just say, and I say this because there's something I want to say. The word 'drug' has been tremendously misappropriated and corrupted by the movers and shakers of society. I mean we all, I believe it's safe to say, are repelled by obsessive self-destructive, unexamined behaviour and that's what is laid at the feet of drugs. However, chasing dollars or pounds, worrying about making a fashion statement, owning a Ferrari, all of these things are obsessive self-destructive habits, so I have a rule, a three-step test if you're thinking of availing yourself of a substance as part of your programme of self-growth and advancement. The first question you should ask yourself is 'Is it ...

Q: ?? afford it.

TM: 'How can I afford it', yes, well, that's zero -- moving on to one. Question one is 'Does it occur in nature?', and question two is 'Does it have a history of shamanic usage?' You see, if it has a history of Shamanic usage, then issues like 'Does it cause tumours, miscarriages, blindness, palsy?' -- this has all been answered, we have our human data, we have five thousand years of use by the Mazatecan Indians or somebody else, we have our human data sample. Then the third test is 'Does it occur naturally or do its near relatives occur naturally in the human brain?', because we don't want to insult the human brain, we don't want to toxify it, we don't want to poison it. Well, the happy conclusion of applying these rules is that the most terrifyingly powerful of the psychedelics pass all tests with flying colours -- DMT being the perfect example. DMT is a megatonnage hallucinogen -- it occurs naturally in the metabolism of every single one of us at this moment. If you were an American audience I would tell you you're holding a schedule 1 drug and are subject to immediate arrest and trial. Every human being on earth falls into this category. This is the Catch 22 that they hold in reserve if they ever have to come after us -- you are holding, and you can't stop yourself. The fact that DMT, that we return to a normal state in only a few minutes from DMT, argues that the non-invasive quality is very important. If you take a drug and feel wobbly 48 or 72 hours later or are having body aches or blurred vision or something like that, this is a drug to stay away from, this is not something you want to get mixed up in. You judge the non-toxicity of the drug by how fast your body is able to return you to normal. MK, which inspired the question, which is ketamine, doesn't pass any of these tests and I did it and I found the state very interesting, but when I saw the data on how it depressed the immune system and there's some concern that it may trigger epileptic kindling, I didn't think it was a good idea. Also the fact that you have to bang it, that's a bad habit. I don't think we should get into that because then it's a vector for disease and then pushes all kinds of the wrong buttons. Yes.

Q: ??

TM: You mean as opposed..

Q: ??

TM: Ah, well, the difference will not be great except in the dose ratio. I think liberty caps are per unit gram stronger than Stropharia cubensis, but still don't you have to eat a dozen or two of them?

Q: ??

TM: Three hundred! Ah ha, okay, well -- and good for you! Stropharia cubensis, I mean, in culture we've grown 170 gram specimens which when dried down go down to 15 grams. Well, what I always say is a dose is 5 dried grams, and I might, since we're on this subject, say something about technique, because I always forget this -- it seems so obvious to me, but it's a revelation to some people. The way you do these things is you do them on an empty stomach in silent darkness, obviously. I mean, you're looking for hallucinations, right? This is a hallucination hunt, it's a vision quest, so people ask the most bizarre questions, example: 'Will I be able to drive?' Now, there's the male dominator ego for you. In no sense of the word will you be able to drive. That's what's going to happen: you're not going to be able to drive, so just, you know, put that in your pipe and smoke it early on and give up the notion of driving. No, you should be in silent darkness, and some people resist the silent part and they say 'But, you know, I always listen to the Mothers of Invention on my ...' well, give it a rest, friend, you know, they're wonderful on the natch, so let the pythagory and inner music issue from your soul in silent darkness. You will be amazed, I mean if it bores you flip on the Top of the Pops, but give it a half an hour before you resort to that. Yes.

Q: Have you had any experience of ??

TM: Yes, well I see that the Guardian dutifully reported all one would need to know to get seriously involved in toad abuse. In America we hear about toad licking and it's always advanced as a folkway of the primitive Australians and we in America have gone on one better. First of all, we don't hurt our toads, we drive out into the desert in our four-wheel-drive vehicles and we gently milk our toads onto what we call the windshield -- a windscreen -- and then it dries in the sun and we get out our little frost scrapers and scrape this better-left-undescribed material off the windshield and then this is smokable. This is 5-methoxy-DMT from Bufo Alvarius, and it passes all the tests. Well, not the test as would occur in a plant, no, it occurs in an animal, that's better. It's interesting, it's one of the few animal-based hallucinogens -- we call it toad foam, as opposed to more inelegant appellations that have been used. It's 5-mythoxy-DMT, so it's a variety of dimethyltryptamine, but compared to DMT it's sort of like AM radio versus 70 millimetre cinemascope. There's what I heard a researcher describe last week as an 'effulgent emotion' -- yes, there certainly is. There's no word for this emotion, but it's very large, but there is very little visual activity, kind of after-image-like stuff, but you know on DMT the hallucinations have an existential veracity that's absolutely jaw-dropping. I mean, they are 3-dimensional, they are highly coloured, they are in motion, these elf-like creatures that one encounters in the DMT space are, I've described them as self-transforming basketballs, they are like jeweled basketballs and they come toward you and then they recede and they're singing in these silvery voices which make objects, they have a language which is visibly beheld -- a favourite theme of mine that we didn't get to tonight -- they make a language which they then present to you -- the objectified language -- and it looks rather like Faberge eggs or sorts of toys that alien astronauts might give their children to amuse them. I mean, when you are shown by one of these -- I call them tykes, these creatures in the DMT state -- when one of these tykes comes bounding toward you and offers one of these mechanised syntactical Faberge machines, you look at it with the perfect knowledge that if you could bring this thing across to this world, no stone would be left upon another, that there is something about it that is confounding, it is literally impossible and yet you're looking at it, it's in front of you, I mean the impossible is happening and, you know, this is a result of that. Yes.

Q: ??

TM: Datura. The question is about datura. I would think of it as a kind of deliriant, actually. The chemical family involved is tropanes. We don't want to get too technical here, but a good rule is when I talk about psychedelics I'm talking about indole alkaloids -- LSD, psilocybin, ibogaine, the so-called cyclocised tryptamines. I'm pretty narrow-minded about all this. Even mescaline doesn't quite make it because it's an amphetamine. Datura, the morphogenetic field that is associated with datura is one of magic working, of the spreading of delusions, it's often used in contexts where somebody is working their sexual will with somebody else who may not be into it. I remember what put me off datura was years ago I lived in Nepal and a friend of mine -- actually an Englishman -- I met him one day in the market and we were just making the small talk there, and it came to my attention from talking to this person that he thought I had paid him a visit in his apartment. He was under the impression that we were sitting in his apartment having this discussion, when in fact we were moving around in an Asian souk, so I thought this is a level of disconnection from reality that we don't need. The thing that's interesting about the indole hallucinogens, and especially about DMT, is there's a core portion of your being that is never lost hold of, that is always observing. And I remember on ketamine one of the things that put me off about it was this is such a reality-obliterating compound that in every trip you come to this moment in which you realise with the force of a revelation 'I'm stoned, that's what's happening, now I remember, I'm a human being, I'm on a trip, this is a trip, I'm on a trip'. And then it all falls into place. Well, what this is telling you is it's nearly over and that you were so cut off from being able to understand that what was going on, you could never remember that there had ever been anything preceding it, you could never anticipate that anything would ever follow upon it, you completely accept this impossible situation. So, I don't like that, I like holding on to this observing eye. Now this may be my own ego clinging to the last grain of ego, but nevertheless I think it's very important that there be a clarity of something throughout the experience and datura seems to erode that fairly seriously. Well, I'm getting the high sign. Oh, one more question. One more.

Q: You bandied chemical words around quite freely here ???

TM: Sorry, I thought you were permitting a question -- you're asking a question.

Q: .. chemical terms around, quite freely...

TM: Oh yes, oh yes.