"McKenna - Jun 20 1993" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKenna Terence)

Vis a vis your whole thing with the organic psychedelics versus LSD, for instance--which is enjoying a great revival right now, presently, in this city--I don't know about elsewhere [laughter]--vis a vis the LSD thing--there's a point in the temporal flow with LSD where it drops, slows down, and then there's the sensation of temporal cessation wherein one generally tends to perceive a presence behind the world--which sounds a lot like the robot elves of yours. I'm just interested in your take, in the distinction that you draw between the organic psychedelics and--for example--LSD.

TM: Well LSD is a kind of--has a foot in both worlds. You know, you start, when you make LSD, with ergonomine, which you get from ergot, which is grown on plantations in Pakistan. But then you elaborate the molecule and make it synthetic. I certainly think LSD--we wouldn't be here, and I wouldn't be here, if it weren't for LSD. The wonderful thing about LSD is that it's possible to manufacture so much in the underground. I mean, there is a problem with that in that it tends to promote criminal syndicalism. [same man in audience: "Not if you give it away!"] Good point! [laughter, applause] But, if you have a trust fund and your roommate is a first-year biochemist, in a long weekend you can produce ten million hits. This mean you're not, of course, involved in helping out the folks in your building, you have some more ambitious agenda. But this is a unique situation with LSD, because you need so little of it. You see, if you set out to create ten thousand doses or ten million doses of psilocybin, the facilities of Upjohn corporation would be insufficient. You would need stainless-steel vats of thousand-gallon capacity and incredible quality-control equipment. So LSD came along at the perfect moment in the life of the collectivity to focus us on the psychedelic experience. But I don't think LSD is what I would call a "full-spectrum" psychedelic, because what I was always obsessed with was visions. And psilocybin and the tryptamines are much more reliable visionary activators. People say, "Why are you so into this vision thing? You're just some kind of vision fascist." [laughter] No, no--I mean, or: Maybe, but! [laughter] Maybe but--here's the thing--the reason the visions were so impressive to me is because that was, to me, the proof that it wasn't me. You know, when you take LSD, you have strange thoughts, many thoughts, illuminating thoughts...

[unintelligible question from audience]

You mean, what do I think of that in terms of DMT? [more from audience member] Well, I never encountered elves on LSD, but I did hear a story recently. And since all we have are anecdotes, I'll pass it on, for whatever it's worth.

A friend of mine told me a story. He and a friend of his miscalculated a dose and took LSD, and then they went to a dance. And they realized they were too loaded to be there. So they just backed up against the wall and slid down the wall and sat there. And as they sat, shoulder to shoulder, mouths hanging, watching these people dance, slowly, slowly, the dance came to a complete halt. Everything was frozen. And at that moment, the door swung open, and an elf came into the room [laughter] and waltzed through all these people, looked around, actually picked up a skirt or two and looked under it, and then exited. And then the movie started up again. [more laughter]

Well now, I'm not a theosophist or an Alice Bailey-ist or any of that malarkey. But on the other hand, this seems to suggest this old theosophical idea of vibratory levels of existence--you know, that if you're moving at a zillion hertz you do not see things moving at very much higher or lower frequencies. Now I never was so aware of the time-stopping thing on DMT, but it is definitely true that when you smoke DMT, if you do sufficiently, you burst in to a place that is inhabited by these--what I call--self-transforming machine elves, these jeweled, self-dribbling basketballs that are squealing and squeaking in this alien language that condenses like metallic rain and falls out of the air of the room and is able to morph itself into Faberge-like objects that are scintillating and faceted and reflective of other possibilities and objects... [side one of tape ends]

Woman in audience: Hi, Terence, I wanted to know what products you have available. [laughter]

TM: Hey. Listen. The point guy can't make the sale! [laughter] But, one of the things that I think is best about the thing I do, or one of the things that I like best about what I do is provide an excuse for the psychedelic community to assemble. Because, believe it or not, these days we look like everybody else out there. How the hell that happened, I don't know! [laughter] So it's very important for you to pay attention to who's here, because without a doubt, somebody here has what you need! [laughter] Whatever you need--you know, what do you need? A loan? A girlfriend? Well, we all need different things--besides the fact that we all need DMT.

[question from audience]

Where do we go from DMT? Well, where do we go from there? I think the idea is to use psychedelics to remove anxiety without undercutting political action. In other words, we can do political work, ulcerated and clenched with terror and fear and always looking over our shoulders; or we can do that same work with a sense of play and lightheartedness. It's the same work, so why not have a good time while we do it? It's the good time we have that drives them so crazy and pisses them so off! [applause]

[question from audience]

What's new and fun that you haven't experienced? Oh, well here's something new and fun. There's a plant, called Salvia divinorum, which is absolutely legal. It's not only legal, the active principle is unknown to science--therefore it can't be made illegal! [sings:] S-A-L-V-I-A D-I-V-I-N-O-R-U-M Salvia divinorum--remember you heard it here first! [laughter] Okay, so here's the deal with this. This is a plant that was carried on the books for years as a hallucinogen, but nobody took it seriously because when the botanists and the chemists would test for alkaloids, it's alkaloid negative. So they said, "Well then, to Hell with it, it just can't be." But recently, an anthropologist who will remain nameless spent some time with the Indians where this stuff is happening, and they showed him how to do it. And he has been telling everyone how to do it. And, you know, true to the spirit of that, here's how you do it.

First of all, this is a plant that looks like a coleus, which is a common houseplant. You could grow this stuff in your window box or your apartment; it would pose no problem whatsoever. It's also--cuttings are available from plant dealers. And what you do is you take about fifteen leaves, which are about like... [hand gesture] that, and you pull out the mid-rib, so you just have the soft, leafy material. And you roll it up into a quid, and you put it in your cheek, and you lie down in darkness where you can see one of those illuminated digital clocks, you know? Lay there for fifteen minutes by the clock, slowly squeezing the stuff down. And it's very bitter. I mean you feel like the whole front of your mouth wraps around this stuff, but it's worth it. It's worth it. And after about fifteen minutes, if you will just spit this into a receptacle, Kleenex, whatever, uh, hygienic product is your choice [snickering] then, about two minutes later, it will begin to stream. In other words, these afterimage-colored lights begin to form and come past you. And about two minutes after that, these cobalt-blue, magenta hallucinations begin to unfold. And what it reminded me of was "Nude Descending a Staircase" but as if Duchamp had done it in ultraviolet and blue and cobalt, and just this--[question from audience] Where did I learn about this plant? Well I've known about it for years, but like everybody else I just didn't take it seriously. [question] No no, it's in the Yuahacan (?) Mountains, it's in the Sierra Mazateca of central Mexico. And after about 45 minutes, it all gently goes away. And believe me, I'm a skeptic, I'm hard to move off the dime, I'm not an airhead. And it worked, it worked. And--very interesting--I called the guy who gave it to me the next morning and I said, "It looks to me like it has the potential to be a craze!" And he said, "The very word that occurred to me--craze! CRAZE!" [laughter] So, like I said, you heard it here first.

Man in audience: I have a question. As a physician who's interested in medical anthropology, what about the effect of this in terms of human development in utero?

TM: You mean the effect on the developing fetus? ["Yes"] Of Salvia divinorum? ["No. Psilocybin."] Oh, psilocybin. Well, here's my approach to this, and this is why I advocate the use of plants with a history of shamanic usage. Because these things are illegal, human research is essentially outlawed. As users we suffer under the prohibition, but imagine that science, one of the most powerful forces in our society, has been told, "GET LOST. Forget about psychedelic chemistry and forget about human studies." This is why I don't advocate MDMA use. In answer to your question, the human data on psilocybin is provided by the fact that it has a history of at least a millennium of human usage. If a plant has been accepted into a society as that one has, as a regularly-applied shamanic tool, then I think you can be relatively certain that blindness, miscarriage, tumors, and so forth, are not a problem. Probably a lot of human beings have given their lives and their health for that data to be available to us in that way. Do you want to follow up? ["No."] No? ["Thank you."] Did I satisfy you? Great! Great.

Woman in audience: As a poet and an art historian who has lived in a lot of cultures where I've worked with indigenous peoples--amongst the Yamamoto I had the blowgun done up my nose, in Peru I tried San Pedro, in Szechuan province in China with the Dalai (?) among Szechuan banai(?) I tried many of the old herbs--one of the things I'd like to mention, which I think a lot of Americans and Europeans don't understand, is the ritual use of these hallucinogenics within the culture. I think it's very important. I'm heading off now to work--to make a film with the indigenous people in Taiwan, Formosa. It's a shamanic culture. I think the problem is that when these things are removed from the mythological stance within a community--the biggest problem in this country--which strikes me as a writer also--is this lack of mythology that exists anymore. It's one thing for hallucinogenics, but it's another thing for also creating a use--as you mentioned before, which I liked very much--of the imagination, a sense that a human being has the right to expand their own horizons, within whatever powers they wish and with whatever means. And I'd like to see a greater awareness that these things can expand an already fertile ground which first has to be created.

TM: That's right! And what might be, [laughter, applause] well...

Woman: Thank you! And, what I'd like to ask, when I come back, is--I used to be on WBAI--and when I come back, I'd like to do something on these people that very few people have worked with. In fact, I have a military permit to go out, and it's a culture that--unlike the Ainu and the Reipus(?) I'm doing another exhibition on now, soon, at the museum--but, the group in Formosa, AKA Taiwan, was first occupied by the Japanese but have a history for thousands of years. And I have to have a military permit to now get out--granted, I have lived in warzones before, you know, with the Hmong in Laos, etc. etc. etc., so as you might say, I get very bored living here! But-- [TM: "Why? They're all here." [snickers] Well that's what I think, also, but, the key is, in a sense, these are ways, too. So I was going to ask you, when I come back, if you'd like to do something, maybe a radio show on some shamanic [unintelligible].

TM: Sure, absolutely. Let me follow up on this. The issue of ritual and style of drug taking: I think that it's--well, here's how I do psilocybin. I do it on an empty stomach in silent darkness. And I think that this is the way to do it, because I'm interested, essentially, in the pure phenomenology of it. I don't want to know what it does to Bach, or Coil. I want to know what it does to nothin'. I don't want to see how it can affect Rembrandt or a natural scene. I just want it where I can study the ding ansich of the thing, you know? And I have nothing against a good time, and hanging out, but it is no substitute for serious psychedelic taking. And, you know, people forget, or people don't realize, if you take a drug that you don't like, then an excellent strategy for getting rid of it is to exercise like a crazy person, like go out and chop a bunch of wood or something. Well, so then what I see is people taking low doses and dancing their asses off, in very noisy environments dense with social signals. This is like a strategy for avoiding the psychedelic breakthrough. How could it ever find you in all of that? [applause]

So I smoke pot and confine myself to vodka gimlets most of the time in public, and then really pile it on in private, really pile it on. These things can't hurt you, not at any reasonable dose. I mean, for instance, let's take psilocybin. The effective dose is 15 milligrams; the LD50 is something like 225 milligrams per kilogram. Your stomach won't even hold that many mushrooms. So death is not a possibility. DMT--same thing. I mean, DMT is a neurotransmitter. People sometimes say, "Is it dangerous?" The answer is, "Only if you fear death by astonishment!"

Woman: So I can call you when I get back and see what I bring back?

TM: Do it! Anybody else?

Man in audience [Dimitri from "Dee-Lite"]: Yeah, I just wanted to comment on the thing about taking psychedelics in noisy environments. I just happen to disagree with what you said, because, first of all I think collective tripping is really important, and it creates a communal vibe that's really terrific and has every advantage to advancing your mind within it. Also you can--there's something to be said about getting lost in the groove. It can join the music and take you to a new--and open your mind with the music, because music is the tool to open your mind. And dancing--dancing is spiritual, dancing makes your...[falters] Excuse me, I'm getting very nervous.

TM: Well, here's the thing. These things are not mutually exclusive, it's not like you have to choose. My problem is, I know people are dancing and they're having these collective experiences. My fear is that they're not having the other experiences. And you have to have both. [man: "Absolutely."] That's all.

And as far as the dance thing, let me say, I mean, I think that what's happening with house music and the ambient music thing is the most healthy sign out of the culture in 25 years--at last, you know. Because the truth is, rock and roll became a tool of the very people it was supposed to discomfort. [applause] You know? [comment from crowd] Pardon me? Well, but what's wrong with ambient and house music? We don't need to "free the harpsichord," you know. [laughter] It's a done deal, I think. And there is so much talent waiting in the wings. I mean, I'm on my way tomorrow to London, on to Frankfurt--these are enormous cauldrons of creativity that are exporting this music all over the world. And the message is absolutely the message that needs to be put out. It's a message of community, of sensuality, and of intelligence. I mean: love, sex, intelligence--that's what the shamen are talking about.