Joe Rogan Experience #298 — Dennis McKenna Transcript

Transcript

0:00 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! I'm sorry, I forgot your names, because we Caitlin McKenna. I started reading it in Vegas, which I think is very ironic to be in that – the darkest of places that mankind has created and start to read this book. could have been i mean i know he was in several of those things the one i remember is alien dream I mean, it's an old...

2:21 And you never heard anyone talk that way. But the thing is, it doesn't matter because Terry, Terrence, he could have read the phone book and it would have sounded great. you know, threads of knowledge and people were hungry to hear it. I mean, here was a guy who You were probably too young for this. And so Terrence went on one of these programs This is our good reason for the excitement here tonight. That was the one. Yes, yes, that was the one

5:39 you really can't talk like that Yeah. Charismatic. somehow based on hexagrams and maybe a map of time and my friend looked at me like i was out of my And, you know, the time wave, I mean, that's one area where we had a very different perspective, you know. But if he rediscovered an ancient Chinese calendar based on the I Ching, that would have been remarkable.

8:37 He postulated several end dates. So we're talking about a cycle of billions of years, right? Right. Well, no one to my knowledge except Terence. worth looking into it would be it would be worth looking into from scholarship yeah definitely i Novelty is ingressing into the continuum, and it appears to be accelerating. But maybe that's just our around. Novelty is ingressing into the continuum and it appears to be accelerating.

11:39 suddenly erupt into Everything after that time was different. So my view of it was that novelty kind of diffuses into history rather than erupt into wave theory right well the time wave theory is this mathematical construct, you know, based on the I Ching that Terence got basically downloaded to him when we did the, what's been famously known as the experiment at La Charrera, you know, which the book also talks about.

14:31 I mean, that was what got us going because we had encountered DMT and the hate in Berkeley in the 60s. that what the fuck was that you know you can't bring back much from it other than just an overwhelming impression of awe and amazement and that you've looked into some other world that's more bizarre than anything you've ever seen, encountered. Just spend a little more time. And so we read about this very obscure drug prepared from a species of tree in South America called Varolas.

17:15 And it happened to be that the ancestral home of the Wetoto was at La Charrera. That's what led us we found that the mission village that we set up, that we stayed at, And again, this was 1971. It's non-toxic, it's orally active, How many days did you do this for? but there was definitely, it was like having trying to get it back to the I Ching and the time wave thing.

22:05 We had this idea that the sounds that you could hear on high doses of mushrooms, lock onto it and then it just pours out of you in a very powerful way and in a way that's that you could actually carry around it would be a binding of space time And this was a shared vision between the both of you. at the end of the day, you would have, or the night, more accurately,

25:43 And this thing that you would have or whatever it was would be responsive to your imagination. That's what we're saying. That's what's even crazier. And so we both went into a prolonged altered state for like 14 days. so they were sober earlier oh well yeah oh that must have been so we were like If anything, it was closer to a shamanic initiation. in this hypervigilant state where he didn't sleep for 14 days, you know.

30:29 But we were getting the message that we did everything right. the previous October, right? which wasn't given to me. It was given to him. I mean, I wasn't doing those things. So if I wanted to take a shit, for example, I shouldn't even be talking about it in public. What else did they know about? But these things are all over the place. And they test things and they're omnivores.

35:51 which is really the only way you can tell, maybe two hundred thousand years older than this emergence of consciousness you know the Most people can't do that without psychedelics, but some can. still manage their way to move through it. So they're essentially walking through a living mushroom trip. background that that's essentially what i'm saying the process of understanding language is a process

40:18 training tools for learning, you know, how to associate meaning with meaningless sounds and essentially meaningless symbols, meaningless visual cues and aural cues. My God, that's all I'd want to do. Climatological factors. the stone-daped theory is that know apes experimenting with And it's not clear the time frame that this took place over. Or were they always there?

44:51 And so when you get that going, They are a tremendous mystery that is terrifying and fascinating at the same time. And this has been right? They can't take their eyes Do you find it frustrating that that's not considered by standard people of science But why would they not consider that as well? These things were painted by people in highly altered states doing shamanic ceremonies.

48:36 because drugs are verboten. aware and or have been educated by this experience because it's not what everybody thinks it And, you know, I mean, despite the lip service that the church pays to all this stuff, I mean, the main mission of the church is to ensure that people do not have genuine religious experiences, right? assertion that, for the folks who don't know this one, just the brief one, he was a scholar who was an ordained minister who became a theologian.

52:22 Scrolls. And he was incidentally, apparently, I mean, you know, so I'm not really qualified to interpret whether his scholarship was together or not. who honestly reported what he found and notions that would be considered heresy by Christians now. but that was the view of Gnosticism. Yeah. discredited because that wasn't compendium of gospels but there's a lot of material that never made the cut, as we know.

57:22 That seems to me to be something that should be considered. I mean, I think, you know, what we have to understand, the proper venue, if you will, So I say it remains a mystery, as does the very conundrum of consciousness. right? have people you know taking mushrooms and and having all these funny ideas and questioning I mean whether they do it out of ignorance or whether there's a more sinister agenda, which is perhaps some of them have had this experience and realize that for people to be having these types of experiences is a threat to the status quo because exactly as you say, it motivates us to change the way we are,

1:02:00 to these different things, because of the fact that they're illegal. There's a lot of misinformation. it just seems like we're missing out. And now we're in a position to revisit this whole thing and take a second look in a calmer way. to change the scheduling of it. Once the scheduling of it is changed, it's now schedule one, right? Once it's approved for that use, you have to change the scheduling of it from Schedule 1 to probably Schedule 2.

1:05:42 maybe it can benefit well people. So what we have to do is create our own institutions And if anybody hears that noise, that's Dennis playing with Velcro. Okay okay don't get mad at us and say there's some static electricity because people Whatever it is there's Well, yeah. I think the pharmaceutical cartel in some ways is lined up against this I think the government is kind of deer in the headlights about it,

1:10:01 We'll do that. Well, it's even grosser what they do, what they actually do. But because you're not violating state law, So there is no medical marijuana in the eyes of the federal government. So you can't even defend yourself by telling the people in the in cages, right in the sense that exactly as you say pot smoking is not nearly as harmful as alcohol so

1:13:22 i guess i'm just disappointed in the fact the whole governmental infrastructure to support the – Prison guards unions. Yeah, all of those things. But you know what I mean. and we encourage research, but then they make it impossible to get legitimate sources of cannabis what is our current species relationship with these plants? much as they might want to and they really don't want to you know there's just a small group that

1:16:41 even had state law enforcement authorities on a regular basis come out to his grow houses. For growing some plants that the state approved – the state made a law. OK, we're good. talking all this craziness on CNN about withdrawal symptoms Ignore all of that. it's maddening. It's a crazy companies paid by the pharmaceutical companies the media everybody else to put out a certain

1:19:57 You probably know about Arrowwood. That's the thing, you know. It should be online. to use them destructively. I'm fond of, I mean, I always tell my students, there is It's all about how people use it, right? It's human behavior is what we need to focus on. And True drug education has got to tell people But drug education doesn't – you can't institutionalize programs that are going to tell people how to use drugs.

1:23:23 Well, I think we're big on people figuring out shit for themselves, which is why we send people out into the world essentially with almost no knowledge whatsoever about sex and love. the world or an objective sense of this whole thing and the right the great mystery of it all you're not encouraged to think about very much. Just do it. Your wants and needs are different. And instead of all these different ideas of what we're supposed

1:26:02 is, well, I don't want to fuck this kid up. So we should be able to figure that out by now. or trying to look at things from you know a broader perspective but if you're a person who I mean, one of the things I like to say, I think that psychedelics are extremely valuable with respect to, you know, sometimes I talk about faith. well, why should you have faith?

1:28:10 Sure. You don't have to have faith. essentially a hallucination. But to that I would reply that, you know, what we call ordinary reality, It doesn't look anything like this. channel essentially but you're still working with a model whether it's a model of the world experienced through the you take an external drug is you tweak one or more of those sets of receptors that the neurons are

1:31:54 But essentially, most of what you experience in your everyday life is just that. It's just You can't paint them. You know, those experiences influence them profoundly. possibility that's the scary part is that it's not just science fiction one of my fascinating concepts that terence had was the uh the the concept of the singularity as he saw it you know

1:34:35 And, you know, in fact, we used to, you know, Terry used to speculate that, you know, that 2012, that the singularity will be triggered infinite time and distance into the future would all be able to access the moment the first time will be a breakthrough. the guy out of University of Connecticut, I cannot remember his name. Well, Terrence had that idea long before this guy did.

1:37:26 what we were immersed in when we were kids. And again, under psychedelics and shamanic states, you can time travel. Very interesting. and really, despite all the conflict in the world, It wouldn't be the president has access to the button. you know, proliferates multiple timelines. If I understand it, it extends to every collapse of a waveform, every collision of atoms, every event, every event, no matter how minuscule or insignificant that we're not even aware of proliferates multiple, multiple time frames.

1:41:26 and they're constantly changing and moving like a tide filled with cells, I've always said to people, like, if you don't want to have a psychedelic experience, you are whether you like it or not. I think the question of whether the brain generates consciousness is one of the, you that all of what we experience arises from the brain it's more that consciousness is

1:44:21 some external reality out there that you can navigate. And that's one of the more profound aspects of the psychedelic experience and particularly dmt you know dmt just You get to step, you get to see it from the other side briefly, and watching a UFO land. of DMT. They had experiences that were similar, if not identical, to And occasionally they come together and the membrane stretches and then you get these types of interactions.

1:49:00 The issue isn't part of it, though, that all these abduction experiences, a good percentage of them happen at night. of things i mean the shamans are just matter of fact about it and they'll just say well yeah that Finally, they got him. the mushroom tell him something that he couldn't possibly know you know and the mushroom was always I mean, it was a conceptual artifact in a certain sense.

1:52:32 Indisputably, it's a calendar. And how so? you know, so it's not clear. It just doesn't account for it. Science can't disprove. so the model fits the data better, right? And he was never able to, or he never did, I mean, you know, if you want it to be scientific, Well, yeah. Something exists, right? I mean, I always thought that what J. Allen Hynek, the UFO researcher, famous UFO researcher, said about UFOs.

1:56:16 And he was assigned by the government to go and research different UFO sightings. extraterrestrial origin extra dimensional origin i don't think we can really say but did you ever At La Charrera, he did. back to the fact that you guys were ingesting the most incredible psilocybin mushrooms every day So that was 40 years ago. psilocybin is is only found in the fungal kingdom right as far as we know it's never been found in the fungal kingdom, right? As far as we know, it's never been found in a higher plant,

2:00:17 itself is two steps from tryptophan right tryptophan is an amino acid that It's found in animals. monkeys. what he found first, it was, uh, what he was Well, that and some close derivatives, which also occur in the mushrooms. Yes, they have to read the book. multi-million-year-long biotechnology experiment, essentially, and the enzymes then this this thing is going to be all over the place.

2:05:17 It's comforting in a certain way to think. Exactly. the ant at a certain point the hostoria they will put these mycelium mycelia will infect the ant's So that's a phenomenon. So that's the most advanced form of forming life in other places. Yeah, that's like next stop crazy town. suppose. I love that quote, and I love that Nope. Like, you can't say you have a gay old time.

2:09:15 ultimately you know people say well what can we conclude from all this and what have you learned You know. Yeah. It's just a desire of insecure The way we think about it is the way it is. Some would say I never have jumped back on, but how much time did it take after that when I could open a can of tuna fish and do normal things to survive? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

2:12:18 some some worries about it when i went back to it but But not really because there were so many other circumstances. We were getting the backwash from the future and that's why it's warping reality. was more than just cuckoo it was this you know this this coordinated uh experience of Terrence and myself where we were linked and we understood that one person is

2:14:49 whether it's hieroglyphs or Egyptian, You mean that La Charrera? But, I mean, there was partly a mercenary motive, but there was also the real motive was we want other people to have these experiences to see if they confirm, you know, what we were experiencing. You know, in the dark, five grams, pay attention, and you will go to the same place. everyday reality. They just accept it. I mean, it's much more matter of fact. Yes, there

2:17:55 All of – in Pablo's iconography, all of these spirits that you see and UFOsally, and plants and animals and all that. I've never heard of this guy before. Oh, I absolutely have seen this guy before. It seems – for whatever reason, it seems like a crazy assertion that you're accessing the experiences of all these people that have ever done this drug.

2:19:32 well, it's a similar experience because these mushrooms activate think so. Yeah, I haven't experimented with it. Have you been interested at all? Not really. No? I find that the substances seem to reliably do it. Yeah. And you've got your nose touching the water and you're right about to push through the other side. source of magnesium too because the salt in the water it's epsom salts oh yeah so it's an excellent source of magnesium, too, because the salt in the water, it's epsom salts.

2:22:06 No, he didn't. Taking psilocybin i haven't i haven't done a lot but but mostly seem to be yeah a good place for it yeah the problem is i have kids and i want to be blasted A good place for it. Yeah. If I get too high, I can still deal with shit. Right. But it would be interesting. I use it all the time. A man had the capacity for cannabis that I've never seen in anyone else.

2:24:39 Amazing, amazing stuff but what was incredible is that you just he would just go up there and say anything and then he would just regale them for hours you know and and in his hippie crash pad on Telegraph Avenue, And his impact, I think, is – it was unbelievably profound, that ability to relay those thoughts in this really compelling way. at these people and you say they couldn't have been more than eight or seven or eight when he

2:28:12 It's a completely viral thing. were the like if there's any glaring errors that he had made that people have either repeated I hope that people don't, you know, I hope that people see that. It was – that kind of dynamic goes on. consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, right? That's a great quote. He didn't see himself as a guru. It's very quick, but it's so powerful even to this day.

2:32:26 so their opinions count for nothing i mean they're like the people you know they're like the Well, it took about 18 months to write the book. but at least a hundred. and a pleasure until they run out of paper. Yes. I thoroughly enjoyed this. website? Yes, we already online. And just the other One of those guys, All right, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much.

2:35:38 They can watch it live on Ustream at ustream.tv. Most likely you. If you want to buy the t-shirts, deathsquad.tv. stoned ape theory. for nuclear energy. Oh, you bet. the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss.