Robert Anton Wilson speaks about the riddle of consciousness and how the human nervous system locks the entire body together, including the mind.
He describes the brain and how it reacts to our cultural programming, our reality tunnel, how our nervous system reprograms itself, and how we can crack our minds open through directed thought.
Lecture Topics Covered:
The Government And Drugs Yoga And Other Techniques Timothy Leary’s Eight-Circuit Model Of Psychological Types
Elements Of The First Four Circuits
Techniques For Changing Imprinting
The Top Four Circuits
Programming Your Own Experience
The Church Committee And Space Migration
We live in our fantasies and endure our realities. – Robert Anton Wilson
Hearing Terence talk about his ideas is even better than reading them.
His eloquent passion drips with every spoken word, and his emphasis on certain words reveals glimpses into his mind-set when he was writing.
True Hallucinations is, well, perhaps Publishers Weekly’s hilarious review said it best:
In 1971 ethnobotanist McKenna ( The Archaic Revival ), his brother Dennis and three friends boated to a town in Amazonian Colombia, seeking a hallucinogenic plant that enables the Witoto tribe to talk to elf-like “little men.” In psychedelicized ravings interspersed with diary excerpts, McKenna records their experiences after ingesting mind-altering mushrooms and other psychoactive plants.
A flying saucer slowly flew over McKenna’s head; he calls it a “holographic mirage” of a future technology. Dennis had a revelation about a “psychofluid” that pervades the universe. McKenna flashes forward to Hawaii in 1975 where mantis-like creatures from hyperspace attack his lover, and flashes back to his tantric lovemaking in Tibet and to Indonesia where unrepentant Nazi scientists tried to recruit him in 1970. He posits the existence of a particle of time, the chronon , which conditions matter. A bizarre book. – Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc
Our self discoveries make us each a microcosm of the larger pattern of history. The inertia of introspection leads toward recollection, for only through memory is the past recaptured and understood. In the fact of experiencing and making the present, we are all actors. – Terrence McKenna
DMT is an illegal, psychedelic compound found in the human body and at least 60 species of plants worldwide. Terence McKenna (who has raised awareness of DMT to its present level) called DMT “the most powerful hallucinogen known to man and science” in his 1994 lecture Rap Dancing Into the Third Millennium
McKenna first smoked DMT as an undergraduate at Berkeley in early 1967. He had experience with LSD—ingesting it “once a month or so”—and other psychedelics, but said in an interview:
It was really the DMT that empowered my commitment to the psychedelic experience.
DMT was so much more powerful, so much more alien, raising all kinds of issues about what is reality, what is language, what is the self, what is three-dimensional space and time, all the questions I became involved with over the next twenty years or so. – Terence McKenna, The Archaic Revival (1992)
Third Eye Perception
From 1990 to 1995, Dr. Rick Strassman administered 400 intravenous doses of DMT to 60 heavily pre-screened volunteers with extensive experience with psychedelics. He documented the results—in fascinating detail, because it “was important that other people knew how to wind their way through this maze,” the two-year process was published in DMT: The Spirit Molecule (Dec 2000), nine months after Terence McKenna died.
The pineal gland of older life forms, like lizards, is called “the ‘third’ eye” and has a lens, cornea, and retina. As life evolved, the pineal moved deeper into the brain. The human pineal gland is not actually part of the brain. Rather, it develops from specialized tissues in the roof of the fetal mouth. From there it migrates to the center of the brain, where it seems to have the best seat in the house.
Twenty-five years ago, Japanese scientists discovered that the brain actively transports DMT across the blood-brain barrier into its tissues. I know of no other psychedelic drug that the brain treats with such eagerness.
This is a startling fact that we should keep in mind when we recall how readily biological psychiatrists dismissed a vital role for DMT in our lives.
If DMT were only an insignificant, irrelevant by-product of our metabolism, why does the brain go out of its way to draw it into its confines? – Dr. Rick Strassman, DMT Researcher
Psychedelic agents, when properly understood, are probably one of the most valuable, useful, and powerful tools available to humanity. Yet, their use is extremely complex, which means that they are widely misunderstood and often abused.
It is not psychedelics that are complex. In their most useful application, they play a rather straightforward role. In my observation one of the outstanding actions of psychedelics is permitting the dissolving of minds sets. One of the most powerful mind set humans employ is the hiding of undesirable material from consciousness. Thus, a very important function of psychedelic substances is to permit access to the unconscious mind.
The unconscious mind is enormously complex and possesses an extremely wide range of attributes, from repressed, painful material to the sublime realization of universal love. With such variance in experience, learning more about psychedelics is essential for safe, sustained benefit.
These 4 books about psychedelics are an amazing foundational base for Psychedelic Knowledge.
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern. – William Blake from the poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Beyond essential reading, Huxley’s recount of his afternoon trip with mescaline tops many psychonauts list for psychedelic themed reading. Aldous is well known for his love of psychedelics, and his narrative ability is undeniable.
To pierce the veil and gain insight into reality and ourselves, yet still bring back a semblance of those insights once rigid mind sets again solidify is the hope of many psychedelic users.
That within sameness there is difference, although that difference is not different from sameness. – Aldous Huxley
What do you mean, blindly? That baby is a very sentient creature… That baby sees the world with a completeness that you and I will never know again. His doors of perception have not yet been closed. He still experiences the moment he lives in. – Tom Wolfe
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is known as the quintessential book that first documented the rise and growth of the burgeoning hippie movement.
Wolfe’s account of Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters brought psychedelic use to the mainstream. This was a time before it was perverted by hedonistic tendencies, but more importantly, before both sides of the coin knew the other even existed.
The world was simply and sheerly divided into ‘the aware’, those who had the experience of being vessels of the divine, and a great mass of ‘the unaware’, ‘the unmusical’, the unattuned. – Tom Wolfe
A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll.
On the surface Hofstadter’s book may seem like it is about mathematics, art, and music, but it is actually about how cognition, thinking, and meaning itself arise from well-hidden neurological mechanisms.
Through analogies between mathematics (Godel), art (Escher), and music (Bach), Hofstadter explains how self-referential loops – ‘strange loops‘ – are the foundation for all meaning. Basically how meaning actually comes about from complex interactions between parts which when taken individually, possess none.
It is a wonderful book that will have you reevaluating the way you perceive and interact with your reality.
Meaning lies as much in the mind of the reader as in the Haiku.
– Douglas R. Hofstadter
How long will this last, this delicious feeling of being alive, of having penetrated the veil which hides beauty and the wonders of celestial vistas? It doesn’t matter, as there can be nothing but gratitude for even a glimpse of what exists for those who can become open to it. – Alexander Shulgin
PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story is a book by Dr. Alexander Shulgin and Ann Shulgin. The main title is an acronym that stands for Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved.
Arranged in two parts, the book is considered the Bible of Phenethylamines (a class of chemicals known for their psychoactive and stimulant effects):
1st Part: A fictionalized autobiography of the couple.
2nd Part: Detailed synthesis instructions for 179 different psychedelic compounds, including bioassays, dosages, and commentary.
How he could be a good user of LSD,” I asked, “And know about the spiritual dimension – all that sort of thing – and still be a crook? I don’t understand.” “Then it’s time you did. Psychedelic drugs don’t change you – they don’t change you character – unless you want to be changed. They enable change; they can’t impose it… – Alexander Shulgin
Ann and Sasha Shulgin – PiHKAL and TiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story
What other psychedelic books have you enjoyed reading?
The tiny, pea sized pineal gland located in the center of the human brain has for ages been thought to be the seat of the soul. Prone to calcification from fluoridated water and other toxins in our food supply, many people are actively interested indetoxifyingand de-calcifying their pineal gland. The rush of cosmic energy that is available when the mind’s eye is wide open, there is no other spiritual experience that compares to it.
What happens to a person who loses this gland to disease or some kind of accident?
Shawn Thorton, who, while studying art in school developed an illuminated painting style that baffles the rational mind. Experiencing severe illness, and often having manic and visionary episodes which revealed the contents of his extraordinary paintings, Shawn was learning to paint while, yet unbeknownst to him, he was suffering from brain cancer and had a tumor forming right where his pineal gland sits.
The over-arching style is reminiscent of an alien technology, laden with intricacies, schematics, and winding connections, a sort of motherboard of madness. Much like the human brain, his paintings show a complexity that is not easily understood.
Was his pineal gland releasing DMT, the spirit molecule in elevated levels while battling cancer?
I suffered from a slow growing cancer in my pineal gland while I attended art school and during subsequent years while my paintings developed with an underlined mythology that alluded directly to the pineal years before I even know of its existence.
I think I’d work myself into a frenzy for a while and yes, when I would fall lie down in bed I’d have something like a manic episode that was very lucid and visionary. That still applies to this day, but I try to control it better so I don’t get sick again.
I’ve had a lot of truly mystical and otherworldly experiences as a result of my history and battle with brain cancer and I’m really drawn to things that resonate with a certain powerful energy, and I’m always honing in on that more and more. whether consciously or subconsciously.
I treat depression with mushrooms. Haven’t done DMT ‘intentionally’. Man made chemicals are a thing of the past for me, as I’m really sensitive. –Reddit
Painting, for me, is largely an attempt to decrypt the mechanisms of illness through a disciplined medium. I feel, on some deep internal level, that through my painting practice I’m engaged in a psychic process to illuminate the intricate vessels and cogs of an insidious physic current that stems, in part, from having had a serious illness, and all the subtle and profound ways I was altered by this experience.
All throughout my early adulthood, I struggled from the mental and physical effects of a slow growing tumor in my brain, the symptoms of which were repeatedly misdiagnosed by my doctors as purely psychological in origin, and it ultimately took over half a decade to get a proper diagnosis and treatment to shrink the tumor. I suffered immeasurably during this period from having repeatedly undergone a host of treatments meant to treat the symptoms of mental illness, and paradoxically, from a mental illness that ultimately could not be contained. The tumor was in the very center of my brain, in a small, mysterious organ at the top of the spinal column, the pineal gland. I didn’t have any prior reason to consider the actual material existence of the pineal before this.
As for its spiritually ominous and physically precarious location at epicenter of my being, my ability to conceptualize these facts seemed utterly unreal, ethereal, like nothing short of a sordid space exploration, as it had been making its presence known to me for so long and now there were surgeons probing into my head – into my consciousness. As I further researched my illness directly after being released from the hospital, and after having had undergone emergency brain surgery a few days earlier, I quickly became very quizzical by what I was finding. What had been developing in my art, half unconsciously, over the previous several years in which I had been very ill and labored to keep painting, all of a sudden became very clear. Elements in the paintings seemed to correlate directly to the pineal gland and to many of its mystical and biological functions that have puzzled humankind for centuries.
All throughout the history of human sciences, religions, and philosophies, of different civilizations and cultures all over the world, people have contemplated and researched the pineal because of its mysterious location at the center of our brain. For me, most notable, was its purposed role in the production of endogenous DMT in humans, and its proximity in our brains to the Ajna chakra, or third eye. I also found it intriguing that the pineal gland regulates biorhythms in humans through the production of the hormone melatonin. This brought to mind images of medical charts; of archetypal schematics and universal symbols.-Shawn Thornton
Before incorporating the knowledge of advanced plant medicines, properly attuning one’s body and mind through diet and exercise is essential.
What goes into the body determines what the body will be composed of physically, mentally, and spiritually. The vessel must be adequately equipped to handle whatever may occur while in the spiritual realms. Body and mind exist in a symbiotic relationship, where the effects on one reflects on the other. Depending on which plant medicine you use, the intensity and length of body preparation varies accordingly.
Many traditional diets share common similarities, but each initiate will know what they need to abstain from to gain the greatest knowledge possible from the experience.
Common themes include abstinence from alcohol, sugar, salt, oils, meat and certain spices. Consumption of raw foods is also highly recommended as processing diminishes the nutritional content of the food. It is also common in some locales for initiates of ayahuasca to stop sexual thoughts and activities during the course of the diet and experience. There are reasons for this abstinence that are highlighted in greater detail here. For plant teachers such as Peyote and Psilocybin, a similar diet should be applied.
Exercises Before Consumption
A short fast before engaging in any plant medicine is recommended, aim for anywhere from 8-24 hours. Attempting to digest a plant teacher with other foods in the stomach can cause the initiate to undergo physical stress.
It is recommended that initiates disengage from the integration of meat and animal products into their bodies for weeks before, during and after the spiritual journey. It is also recommended that initiates let go of whatever it is they may be struggling with in their lives.
Temporary separation from those attachments which we feel we cannot live without will serve to enlighten us. If one struggles with addictive behavior, one should surrender that behavior before encountering the plant medicine if they wish to maximize their knowledge from the plant.
Anything one can do to purify and cleanse both thoughts and action – before and after the experience – will serve to increase penetration and understanding.
Psychedelic Spirituality Podcast – Proper Diet and Exercise for Spiritual Experience
Terence McKenna served as the most visible expert on psychedelic culture during his time. He wrote five books – two with his brother Dennis – on his way to develop a worldwide following. Brainy, eloquent, and hilarious, McKenna applies his Irish gift of gab to making a simple case:
Psychedelics are still controversial but McKenna’s lectures helped them emerge from the underground and into normal lives.
Today’s users are surgeons, bankers, physicists, computer programmers. They are productive members of society. You can’t point your finger at them and say they’ve dropped out.
– Scott O. Moore, editor of the psychedelic journal The Resonance Project
In 1971, McKenna and his brother went to the Amazon to hunt for ayahuasca, a legendary shamanic brew. But when they arrived at the Colombian village of La Chorera that spring, what they found were fields blanketed with Stropharia cubensis, aka shrooms. Serious psychonauts knew all about the psilocybin mushroom from scholarly books on shamanism, but no one in the US was eating S. cubensis in the early ’70s because no one had figured out how to cultivate them. After returning from South America, the McKennas discovered the secret, which they promptly published. Shrooms were on the menu.
It can be tough to take the psychedelic plunge and still remember to bring a bit of that often indescribable essence back with you, to the real world. Fortunately, Nisvan’s ability to recall his Ayahuasca visions is in full display.
Enjoy Nisvan’s incredible visionary art inspired by his psychedelic shamanic ayahuasca ceremonies.
Nisvan’s Ayahuasca Visions
Inner vision
Letting go of physical restrictions, shifting into a multi-layered consciousness of sound/light vibrations.
El Rey Leon
Power animal, giving strength and protection on the inner levels.
Flight of the Eagle
Travelling with lightspeed to the outer realms.
We are star-princes
Two elders appear, offering healing to the soul.
Spectral bat-insect
Trying to hide in the folds of my memory.
Galactic knights assembling
Entering the inner-space dome
Palace of light
Dark Chrissalis bird of habit disintegrated at the treshold of the palace of light.
Healing Buddhas
Appearing in caleidoscopic mandala vision, beaming their love directly from the source
What we need is a massive coming out of people who have done psychedelics and accomplished a lot. – Rick Doblin, Founder of MAPS
Dorian Yates Comes Out of the Psychedelic Closet, Talks Ayahuasca and Smoking DMT
One of the most important issues we strive for is our collective freedom of consciousness, we dearly need a psychedelic renaissance.
This is only to come about if we reach a level of social acceptance where reason thwarts taboo. Therefore, it is imperative that more and more people like Dorian step up — we may find our consciousness revolution materialize faster than expected.
The educational value of entheogens and psychedelics may be their capacity to reliably evoke experiences of wonder and awe, to stimulate transcendental or mystical experiences, and to catalyze a sense of life meaning or purpose. – Kenneth W. Tupper, Ph.D.
With the publication of Sacred Mirrors: The Visionary Art of Alex Grey in 1990, the psychedelic community soon discovered that the art contained within its pages resonated to many like miraculoussnap shots of the psychedelic realm, faithfully rendered vistas brought back with great skill from the far shores of the visionary experience.
My art has always been in response to visions. Rather than confine myself to representations of the outer worlds, I include portrayals of multi-dimensional imaginal realms that pull us towards consciousness evolution.
– Alex Grey
The use of Alex Grey’s artwork on the album covers and stage shows of bands like Tool and The Beastie Boys greatly increased his general popularity with youth culture, while the inclusion of his artwork in the actual Burning Man structure in 2006 essentially anointed his chosen status as this generation’s most important psychedelic artist.
In the earliest body of work that has established Alex Grey’s special place in psychedelic history, his art manages to blend the physical realms of the human body—a feat in itself only achieved by many years of training in medical drawings—with the psychic energy fields and auras of the mystics and quantum physicists, the knowledge of which has come to the artist from years of meditation, study, and contemplation.
Human figures are stripped of their covering (“the skin encapsulated Ego”) to reveal a complex multi-colored system of organs, bones, veins, and arteries that can be seen to be generating rainbow fields and crackles of pure white energy that penetrate the vacuum in every direction, an effect that could seem ghoulish were it not for the presence of the subjects eyes, which gaze out at the viewer with an often astonishing humanity and are revealed as the true ‘windows of the soul’.
Alex Grey has said that after the unexpected death of Terence McKenna, he felt that he (and others) had felt the call to ‘step up and speak out about psychedelics’ to try and occupy the void in psychedelic culture that Terence’s early departure created. And one of the reasons that Alex Grey has become the most popular speaker on psychedelics since Terence McKenna—and perhaps the thing that separates him from other visionary artists—is the fact that there is a serious philosophy behind Alex’s work, and that he himself has been (and continues to be) one of the great students of psychedelic history.
The Psychedelic Experience is an artistic video with a powerfully positive psychedelic message. The evocative images are timely interwoven with Aubrey’s voice, a harmonic synthesis of passion.
Aubrey Marcus – The Warrior Poet– is a well-known psychonaut, who, much like Jason Silva, positively describes the psychedelic experience for it’s ability to heal and reveal us.
Full Transcript:
What is the psychedelic experience? Aldous Huxley believed it was the fundamental craving of the human spirit. A desire to turn off the survival biased filter of perception just for a moment… and catch a glimpse beyond the bars of our cognitive prison.
The psychedelic experience does not require drugs. Religious history and spiritual traditions are built upon these sublime moments. Messiahs hear the voice of God after a 40 day fast. Holy men, having isolated themselves in a cave, suddenly emerge with visionary truth.
But to indulge in a 40 day fast to reach this heightened state is like burning your house down to bake a loaf of bread. One hour in a salt-water isolation tank quiets the noise of sensation until awareness becomes the mirror that reveals you to yourself. A single session of holotropic breathing restricts our mental chatter long enough to plunge you into the zero-state of visionary Inspiration. Then there are the earth movers… The plant medicines at the core of many religious sacraments, which according to Graham Hancock were integral to inspiring the earliest known art in caves throughout Europe.
These plants are technologies. In a recent placebo controlled study completed by Johns Hopkins university 18 healthy adults were given Psilocybin, the active ingredient in ‘magic’ mushrooms. Fourteen months after participating in the study, 94% of those who received the drug said the experiment was one of their top five most positive experiences; 40% said it was the single most meaningful experience of their life.
Ayahuasca, long called the Master Medicine by the healers of the rainforest, offers an experience with the most visually powerful and mysterious of all molecules endogenous to life, DiMethyltryptamine.
Iboga, the root of an African shrub, confronts you with the voice of your own inner truth for 24 waking hours and is being used to treat Heroin addiction with relapse rates reported at a shockingly low 7%.
Why doesn’t the world embrace these technologies? Terrence Mckenna has an answer, “It takes courage to take psychedelics — real courage. Your stomach clenches, your palms grow damp, because you realise this is real — this is going to work. Not in 12 years, not in 20 years, but in an hour!”
What can the Psychedelic Experience be?
The cloth that wipes clean ourlens of perception,
The compass that points true north to our life’s calling,
The lantern in the catacombs of our subconscious,
The sword stroke that unfetters the muse,
The sunlight that dispels the shadows of our past
Or simply a respite of eternity, in the fast flowing river of time.
I’ve been to the other side, stared unflinching into the eyes of my eternal soul and seen a matrix of a thousand possible destinies. I’ve witnessed the span of our current universe contained in an unceasing heartbeat, each world a single bloodcell and each contraction a new existence for life itself. I’ve learned of humility on the back of a dragon, felt the terminal extreme of heaven and hell in the marrow of my bones, died and been reborn anew. What will your psychedelic experience be?
00:10 – Doug Stanhope 05:07 – Joe Rogan 07:56 – Bill Hicks 13:22 – George Carlin 15:34 – Duncan Trussell
Comedians are good at describing stories in vivid, interesting ways. That’s what makes listening to these world-class comics share their psychedelic experiences so cool.
Featuring Doug Stanhope, Joe Rogan, Bill Hicks, George Carlin, and Duncan Trussell, Comedians on Psychedelics attempts to aid us in piercing the veil behind our illusory reality.
These are real people attempting to give their own piece of the experiential puzzle with as little distortion as the limits of language and memory allow. It’s not perfect, but besides first-hand psychedelic experience, it’s the best we’ve got.
