Had a kind of out of body/vision. There was a hum not unlike music. The only thing close to the feeling is doing active imagination and creative practice, it does feel like the realm of the ancestors.
#Psilocybin #legalizeIt Those who preach that the only way to achieve lasting sobriety is through total abstinence from alcohol and all other drugs may be surprised to learn that the supposed patron saint of abstinence, Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, was a firm believer in the ability of LSD to free some hardcore alcoholics from their addiction. Bill Wilson’s enthusiasm for LSD as a tool in twelve-step work is best expressed in his correspondence in 1961 with the famous Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. Jung was discussing how he agreed with Wilson that some diehard alcoholics must have a spiritual awakening to overcome their addiction. He pointed out that the Latin word for alcohol is spiritus. “You use the same word for the highest religious experience,” Jung wrote, “as for the most depraving poison.” That letter of January 30, 1961 - in response to a long letter Wilson wrote to Jung - is fairly famous in AA circles. But in researching my book Distilled Spirits - Getting High, then Sober, with a Famous Writer, a Forgotten Philosopher and a Hopeless Drunk, I discovered a second Wilson letter to Jung. In that letter of March 29, 1961, Wilson writes at length about his experiments using LSD to help members of Alcoholics Anonymous have the spiritual awakening that is central to the twelve-step program of recovery. “Some of my AA friends and I have taken the material (LSD) frequently and with much benefit,” Wilson told Jung, adding that the powerful psychedelic drug sparks “a great broadening and deepening and heightening of consciousness.” Wilson told Jung that his first LSD trip in 1956 reminded him of a mystical revelation he had after hitting bottom in the 1930s and winding up in a New York City hospital ward for hardcore alcoholics. “My original spontaneous spiritual experience of twenty-five years before was enacted with wonderful splendor and conviction,” he wrote. LSD was still legal in 1956, and in Wilson’s case initially taken under the medical supervision of UCLA researcher Sidney Cohen, and with the spiritual guidance of his Wilson’s friend, Gerald Heard, an Anglo-Irish mystic and early proponent of psychedelic spirituality. Wilson would go on to quietly form a bi-coastal psychedelic salon with various leading lights of that decade, including the writer Aldous Huxley. Wilson’s earlier spiritual experience occurred in December of 1934, before LSD was even invented. It happened during Wilson’s fourth and final stay at a private New York City hospital that employed something called the Towns-Lambert Cure to treat their alcoholic clients. Many of these patients, including Wilson, were once-successful businessmen whose drinking had spun out of control during the Great Depression. “Suddenly,” Bill would later recall, “my room blazed with an indescribably white light. I was seized with an ecstasy beyond description.” That room was in a rehab center where doctors employed a potion which included two drugs derived from plants known to cause delirium and hallucinations. One of them is belladonna and the other henbane, was long associated with witchcraft and potions said to summon the spirits of the dead. (Warning to psychonaunts: both of these plants can be poisonous at high doses.) So there’s a good chance that psychoactive plants played a role in what came to be known as the founding vision of Alcoholics Anonymous, even though the effects of the herbs used at Towns Hospital differ from other psychedelic plants and from the LSD Wilson would begin experimenting with two decades later. Here’s how Bill W. would later describe his Towns Hospital vision: “In the mind’s eye, there was a mountain. I stood upon its summit where a great wind blew. A wind, not of air, but of spirit. In great, clean strength it blew right through me. Then came the blazing thought, ‘You are a free man.’ ” In my view, it doesn’t really matter if Bill’s vision was caused by psychoactive plants, divine revelation, or the hallucinations hardcore drunks sometimes experience when they hit bottom and stop drinking. What matters is that the vision transformed his life and inspired a crusade to free other alcoholics from addiction. One of the foundations of the twelve-step recovery program Wilson and company devised in the 1930s is the proposition that alcoholics and other addicts must undergo a “spiritual awakening” inspiring them to “turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand Him.” Those are the only words in the twelve steps that were printed in italics, indicating an openness in the early AA circles to finding God in the Judeo-Christian tradition, Eastern spirituality or, twenty years later, in a tab of acid. In fact, long before he discovered psychedelics, Wilson was a serious student of paranormal psychology and various forms of spiritualism, holding seances and other gatherings with some of the leading psychics of his time. In his second letter to Jung, Bill Wilson told Jung that many members of AA “have returned to the churches, almost always with fine results. But some of us have taken less orthodox paths. Along with a number of friends, I find myself among the later.” Wilson cited the Canadian research of Humphry Osmond, the man who turned Huxley onto mescaline in 1953. Osmond reported that 150 hardcore alcoholics were “preconditioned by LSD and then placed in the surrounding AA groups.” Over a three-year period, they achieved “startling results” when compared to similar drunks who were not treated with psychedelics, but only got AA. “My friends believe that LSD temporarily triggers a change in blood chemistry that inhibits or reduces ego thereby enabling more reality to be felt and seen,” Wilson told Jung. Jung became seriously ill around the time he received Wilson’s second letter. He never answered that missive and he may not have even gotten a chance to read it before he died. Jung died on June 6, 1961. Bill Wilson died ten years later from diseases caused by the other addiction he could never shake - cigarettes. In the end, not much came of Bill Wilson’s idea to introduce LSD into Alcoholics Anonymous. More cautious and conservative elements in the AA fellowship pushed back, questioning their founder’s unbridled enthusiasm for the drug. In one letter, Wilson asserted that the powerful psychoactive compound was “about as harmless as aspirin.” But in another piece of correspondence, he acknowledged that LSD does not have “any miraculous property of transforming spiritually and emotionally sick people into healthy ones overnight.” Wilson also wrote that those opposing his LSD enthusiasm in AA were joking that “Bill takes one pill to see God and another to quiet his nerves.” “It is striking that our society has forgotten how critical LSD was in the early stages of the development of psychopharmacology, and that it continues to be a seminal contributor to the field today. It is reminiscent of the patriarchy “forgetting” the role of psychedelic plants in spiritual and religious settings. During the late 1940s through the late 1960s, hundreds of scientific papers and dozens of books, monographs, and scientific meetings discussed the latest in psychedelic drug research. Many of the key figures of academic psychiatry and pharmacology began their career in this field. Presidents of the American Psychiatric Association, chairmen of psychiatry departments, advisers to and members of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-all cut their teeth in the psychedelic research field. It was an exciting, well-funded, and creative time.” Rick Strassman, Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds through Psychedelics & Other Spiritual Technologies “Psychedelics helped me to escape.. albeit momentarily.. from the prison of my mind. It over-rode the habit patterns of thought and I was able to taste innocence again. Looking at sensations freshly without the conceptual overly was very profound. We are sneaking psychedelics back into our society through research like the MDMA research that's going on, through the research for the use of marijuana for pain, through research with the dying [with psilocybin], and ultimately we will do the same kind of stuff about alcoholism, about prison rehabilitation, so on. I mean, its obvious that psychedelics, properly used, have a behavior-change psychotherapeutic value. But from my point of view, that is all underusing the vehicle. The potential of the vehicle is sacramentally to take you out of the cultural constructs which you are part of a conspiracy in maintaining. And giving you a chance to experience once again your innocence.” Ram Dass “LSD was not a pharmacological agent generating exotic experiences by its interaction with the neurophysiological processes in the brain. This remarkable substance was clearly an unspecific catalyst of the deep dynamics of the human psyche. The experiences induced by it were not neurochemical artifacts, symptoms of a toxic psychosis as mainstream psychiatrists called it, but genuine manifestations of the human psyche itself.” Stanislav Grof, When the Impossible Happens: Adventures in Non-Ordinary Realities
32:10-32:56 really beautiful, I think we are still a long way from learning this lesson in today’s medical practices. Conforming and the pressure for you to conform comes before compassion
Interesting what he says about taking psychedelics in dreams. I’ve never taken it in real life yet but have taken ayahuasca in a dream before and tripped in quite a beautiful tryptaminergic fashion. Makes me recall what he said too about ayahuasca essentially being like “brain soup”. It seems we can have endogenous ayahuasca yagé experiences.
Terence McKenna was a scientist of the highest order. "Science is the exploration of the experience of nature without psychedelics. And I propose, therefore, to expand that enterprise and say that we need a science beyond science. We need a science which plays with a full deck. No culture on earth is as heavily narcotized as the industrial West in terms of being inured to the consequences of maladaptive behavior. We pursue a business-as-usual attitude in a surreal atmosphere of mounting crises and irreconcilable contradictions. The tension in the world is the tension between the ego and the feminine, not between the masculine and the feminine. Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience upon which primordial shamanism is based is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego. Science is the special province of the ego. And magic and art are the special province of something else. I could name it, but I won't. It prefers to be unnamed. Human populations that do not have contact with the psychedelic tremendum are neurotic because they are male ego dominated. If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature’s larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western Civilization. To me it begins and ends with these psychedelic substances. The synergy of the psilocybin in the hominid diet brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination. All the accoutrements that distinguish us from animal existence were put in place when we had a different kind of mind than we have now. We didn't have a mind that favored role specialization, and male dominance, and anxiety over female sexual activity related to feelings of male ownership. That all came later. Sometime in the last 50,000 years, before 12,000 years ago, a kind of paradise came into existence. A situation in which men and women, parents and children, people and animals, human institutions and the land all were in dynamic balance and not in any primitive sense at all. Language was fully developed, poetry may have been at its climax, dance, magic, poetics, altruism, philosophy. There's no reason to think that these things were not practiced as adroitly as we practice them today and it was under the boundary dissolving influence of psilocybin. If psychedelics are exopheromones that dissolve the dominant ego, then they are also enzymes that synergize the human imagination and empower language. They cause us to connect and reconnect the contents of the collective mind in ever more implausible, beautiful, and self-fulfilling ways. One way to think about what psychedelics are is as catalysts for language development. They literally force the evolution of language. You cannot evolve faster than your language because the language defines the culture of meaning. So if there's a way to accelerate the evolution of language then this is real consciousness expansion and it's a permanent thing. The great legacies of the 60's are in attitudes and language. It boils down to doing your own thing, feeling the vibe, ego-trip, blowing your mind. Eros is an ego-overwhelming, boundary dissolving, breakthrough creating force scripted into human life that is pretty intrinsically psychedelic. What is needed is a spirit of boundary dissolution, between individuals, between classes, sexual orientations, rich and poor, man and woman, intellectual and feeling toned types. If this can happen, then we will make a new world. And if this doesn't happen, nature is fairly pitiless and has a place for us in the shale of this planet, where so many have preceded us." Terence McKenna
He makes it like don't touch this I took an LSD trip that I asked God if you let me come back I'd never try it again. Come to think of it Alex Gray's wife, in an article. describe exactly the trip that I had
This is important ‘stuff’ re: one’s epiphanic experience on or off psychoactive substances, i.e. calling in the butterflies. Ask-‘if I call in butterflies do they make a sound?’ Levity related to if a tree falls without a withess does it make a crash. For me, shamanic connections on n off cubensis or good lsd and while fasting in ceremony, are SUPPOSED to be private unwitnessed moments. They’re meant only for you anyway. Beware the fkd up new age charlatans who claim to have powers and magic. Liars. They possess mere ‘claims’ nothing more. I’ve had many spiritual visitations from the animal afterworld during inipi, my cannunpa, hanblechia and always, after those moments end the skepital work begins. What was internal ego n subconscious n what was a true n real external visitation from spirit? The answer will dictate your truth so be careful what you choose to believe. Far too many ppl NEED to believe everything their brain/mind sees feels hears and receives is legit. But it’s not so. I love TM - what a pure orator. Grateful for the upload. Love to all! A’ho.
Still fascinated by ppl finding and posting up this material. How ppl find these audio recordings is amazing. Peace ✌️ to everyone who embarks on their sacred journey.
McKenna has been a teacher for me over the years. Beyond his words and perspective that I admire so much, his ability to stay quiet and give other people a chance to discuss where they’re at or how they are perceiving the shared experience is impressive. He really gave the guy in the beginning some space to say what he needed to say. And Terence genuinely listens to every word that is being said and try’s to have real conversations with the people in attendance.
I agree that in this specific oratory (messed up by that one man’s incessant talking about himself as crazy) I was struck by TM’s caution and fear about going too far on psychoactives. The crisis he speaks of on a trip/journey is exactly what should happen on lsd or cubensis. Albert Hoffman himself as others were trying to study schizophrenia in patients by using ergot to activate schizophrenia in doctors who wanted to experience some of their patients symptoms. Difference ‘tween psycho’naughts and truly schizophrenic ppl is as Watts said, the shaman lives and learns in his split/delicate mind n brain while the mentally ill simply drown. Trick always is not to go so far under the water that you cannot breach the surface again. Peace ✌️
he makes that comment about enlightenment and not being able to achieve it if your mother is still alive ...he tries to make it mystical its not .....one of our strongest attachments is to our mother ....you cant reach enlightenment if you still have attachments. 😢
What is the effective dose of psilocybin for triggering madness, the question doesn't even exist back in the world you left behind.... that's so deep and hurts❤ I love this man
I'm afraid if I take mushrooms then I'll become detached from this reality, I'm very open minded person, I have lucid dreams, I talk/laugh/cry... during sleep but I can't remember that, I feel deep inside that the mushroom is calling me and yet, I'm afraid. If anyone can help please don't hesitate 🙏
😊no need to be scared. My suggestion is this: find or grow your own Golden Teachers (cubensis shrooms) and after picking and drying FULLY (snap like a cracker, no moisture) plan your journey. You don’t need 3-5 grams or the heroic dose and start with one mushroom cap and stem and make tea. Drink n perhaps swallow the soggy shroom. But less IS more. Youll be fine. Peace ✌️ n’ light to you.
Terrance, no money in the world can reverse the decay of the physical body, i fed it, made it look perfect, gave it what it wants and needs, but genetic makeup are millions of years in the making and i can't keep up with it, all i do now is acting in this physical domain with less emrions
2:23:37 absolutely unbelievable. 3 or so days ago apple released their first generation of these light filtered vr goggles. He predicted this 30 or so years ago. Constantly dumbfounded how intelligent this man is
get outta here with the "toxic masculinity" crap. terrence said a lot of interesting things, but he was wrong about climate and so called "masculinity."
Im like 50 minutes in and I gotta say this is one of his best talks. Its like deathly serious, the tone he takes is so harrowed man but its prescient, to a scary degree. He predicted a lot of the modern world I guess all those trips to hyperspace got him a bit ahead of the curve..goddamn.
