Dennis McKenna
Appearances
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And the FDA is saying, well, actually, we can dismiss it. And we hold the keys. And you guys didn't meet the criteria for design of the study that we insist on because it wasn't a placebo-controlled study. And so nobody knows where that's going. I mean, they said basically design a better study or a different study. But I mean, it's created a big problem.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And I don't know where it's going to go in terms of the advancement of psychedelic therapies in biomedicine. But, you know, I mean, it may be that psychedelics will not go anywhere because of this, because of this insistence, because the whole... pharmaceutical-industrial complex is so rigid in the way that they regard this. So we'll see. Anyway, to bring it back to coca again, what I wanted to...
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
The point I want to make when I deliver my talk is that coca is a good example of, you know, cocaine was isolated from coca. And it's one of these pure compounds that has many of the properties but not all of the properties of coca. But that's been the fixation. And it's caused so much damage, you know, on the – geopolitically, socially, everything else.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
I mean, not only is it a toxic, harmful drug, but the political impact it's had has been tremendous. Tremendously negative. The drug cartels who control the production and distribution of cocaine, basically these indigenous families or families of farmers that...
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
cultivate coca they just go and they just say well you know you're working for us now you know they don't want to work for them but they just say we're working you're working for us and if you don't work for us we'll kill you you know and then they deal kill a few of them to keep to set an example and then the whole cartel thing controls the production of cocaine if cocaine were legalized
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
it would be worthless. Cocaine is not an expensive compound. You can make it for pennies. You can extract it if it were not a controlled substance. It would not be a valuable compound. I mean, if caffeine were declared illegal tomorrow, you'd see many of the same things go
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And you could go to a pharmacy and you could buy it. If you wanted to use cocaine, you could just buy it. People could use it. It wouldn't have the glamour. It wouldn't be the romantic thing that it is, but it wouldn't have the glamour and these people would just be... you know, sort of viewed as kind of, well, pathetic drug addicts.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
But okay, if they like it, let them buy it, a few bucks, and let the rest of the world use coca. And coca is a wonderful plant. It has many benefits besides most of the coca preparations that are used have very small amounts of cocaine. It's a mild stimulant. It's about as toxic as green tea, you know, and it's... It has very good nutritional properties.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
It's the main remedy for altitude sickness in the Andes, no sorts of sicknesses. There's one group we'll be presenting at this COCA conference on trying to develop COCA extract as a treatment for ADHD. for which it's very effective. Yeah, because the FDA does allow botanical drugs to be developed. There is a protocol for that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
So they're trying to apply FDA botanical frameworks for developing a coca extract, which doesn't contain cocaine or contains only traces of cocaine for ADHD. And many other things coca is useful for, you know, and all sorts of products are being developed from, you know, non-cocaine. coca-derived products. And that's a lot of what this conference is about, to talk about this.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
To neutralize the cartels, basically create alternative markets for coca, so these farmers will have a place to sell their coca. Companies can develop these products, and if the prohibition of cocaine can be lifted,
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
uh you know ended then the cartels will not have a market and the whole their whole grip on this whole thing geopolitically will fall apart and so that's what this is this conference is bringing together medicine botanists who have studied coca for many years, a whole bunch of regulatory people involved in drug policy in Europe, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, which is where they're produced.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Like I said, the vice president of Bolivia, who's been a strong public advocate for coca, Not cocaine. Coca for many years is going to be there and other high-profile people, people from the UN, World Health Organization, and so on. So we have been able to attract a pretty high-level bunch of folks, bunch of experts.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And we're going to have this three-day conference, have this active dialogue go on.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Right. All of that. And the people that, you know, fundamentally at base, it's the people who consume cocaine, you know. Right. if you like cocaine, that's fine. I mean, sure, it's a pleasurable drug, but you should be able to go to the pharmacy and buy it. Well, they use it for brain surgery, right? Neurosurgeons use cocaine? They do.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
They use it as an anesthetic for certain kinds of surgery, like nasal surgery and that sort of thing. The thing is, because it's under the control of the cartels, ethically, there's real problems with using cocaine. It's similar to blood diamonds. I mean, it's essentially the same thing. Blood diamonds are available to the world. How many children get enslaved?
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
The environmental impact is tremendous. It's very much the same. The world cocaine markets are based on slavery. You know, murder, environmental destruction. I mean, the processing of cocaine. Just like the processing of iPhones. What's that?
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Right, right. Quite so. Make a good point. But I'm not crusading for iPhones.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
So the idea is if we can have this conference and shift the conversation and point out the ethical conundrum of consuming cocaine, you know, and the problems that create because that just ripples through, you know, governments. Governments are corrupt. Institutions are corrupt. People are corrupt.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And basically the poor farmers who are at the base of all this and exploited, they don't have a lot of choice. So the idea with this conference is we want to have this conversation and see if we can begin to move the regulatory framework.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
frameworks toward more rational, toward the liberation of non-cocaine coca products, as well as the change in the regulation of cocaine toward something that can be available, but is not... I mean, it's the fact that it's illegal is what... Gives cocaine value, you know. That's why it's worth millions of dollars. It's not that it's an expensive compound to make. It's just because it's illegal.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
That's the first thing that needs to change. In the drug regulatory laws, very few plants are prohibited as plants. Coca happens to be one of those that are. Cannabis is another. Peyote is another. And that's because the laws were formulated in a – number one, in a way that was the people formulating the laws.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
This all happened when the UN Convention on Narcotic Drugs was formed at the beginning of – at the end of the 60s. And certain plants were designated to be illegal as plants. And then the rest of it was mostly as chemicals. So the first thing that needs to happen is globally the prohibition of coca as a plant needs to end. I mean, anyone should be able to grow coca like cannabis is now.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
You know, cannabis is pretty much, you know, even though cannabis is still a prohibitive someplace, but it's increasingly become legal. Lots of people here in Florida are growing coca. People in Hawaii are growing coca.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Growing coca? Yeah. Hell yes, of course. It's easy to grow. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Yeah, it's similar to cot. It's used very much that way. It's chewed or… And then there's this material called Bombay, which is a powdered form of it. And people take that and basically make it quid or you put it between your gum and your cheek and then you just suck on it. And you get this effect. And they make teas out of it. They make food out of it. They make all kinds of things.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
The effects came on very quickly and that you saw the little people. They were big into seeing the little people and we saw little people on DMT. So we thought this is it. We got to go to South America. That is what led us to go to South America in 1971. to La Charrera, that was the cultural, that was the ancestral home of the Wetoto.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And they're going to be talking about all this. You should put the webpage up there so people can look at it. Where is the conference going to happen? It's going to happen in the Sacred Valley of Peru at this tourist retreat center that I've often gone to. It's a lovely place. And the Sacred Valley is kind of the center of the Andean coca traditions. Coca is...
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
at the center of the Andean, both medicine and cosmovision, if you will. I mean, to them, it's a sacred plant. And so it's appropriate to do it there. And people can look at this website and look at the bios and what people will be presenting.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
So it's a... I mean, it's not that we're the only policy discussion going on on this. Other people are beginning to wake up. There have been meetings at the World Health Organization and the UN recently. Wade Davis is one of the chief organizers in this conference, and because of who he is, he's very recognized in this.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
uh as a public advocate for more sane you know regulation of coca so he's been at a couple of meetings at the un and world health organization and these global organizations are beginning to wake up to the fact that well what we've got now is not working you know the
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
the global prohibition of coca is creating more problems than anything else because of the cartels so you know and the more effort goes into prohibiting coca and controlling the supply this all benefits the cartels the last people that want to see coca legalized are the cartels right because their business goes down the tubes if that's done and they're done So, why am I doing this?
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Well, I am doing it because I'm an ethnobotanist and I'm interested basically in useful plants, you know. That's what it comes down to. And coca is a plant that has been demonized and stigmatized because it's the source of cocaine for so long. So people say, well, it is this evil plant. No. Again, it comes back to human behavior.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
The people that are extracting cocaine and marketing it and putting people into slavery and all that – To get cocaine, they're the evil ones. Cocaine is simply a plant, you know, and it's a very good plant. It's a beneficial plant. So I'm not an expert on cocaine. My expertise in ethnobotany is basically ayahuasca. That's what I've done most of my work on. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
But I'm interested generally in preserving biodiversity, preserving indigenous knowledge about plants and preserving the plants. And so I – and I'm a good friend of Wade's. And so when we – together, we came up with this idea about doing this forum, this symposium. And I'm all in because –
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
if we get a global uh notice for this then people who are in positions influential positions can change can make change and that's why we're you know again people can if they want to support this they can donate to the academy we can they can attend if they're interested we have about 10 slots available for guests
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
So we thought, we gotta go to La Charrera, we have to find this thing, you know, cause this is it, cause it may be the ultimate mystery. I mean, you know, You got to understand, I'm 20. My brother is 24. We're both fanatics. We're batshit crazy. You know, we're going after this quest, you know, which we thought of as the secret at the time.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And because of the technical limitations, we won't be able to live stream this from there. But all the talks will be recorded and we'll upload them every night after each session. We'll upload them to the website. They'll just be available for people to look at when they want to. So that's – That's our latest obsession, I guess you could say.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Is the coca.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Yeah, I emailed it, and it's good that you raised it. I emailed it. It was a small study because there's this big problem, obviously, with cocaine addiction, right? And a lot of people are addicted to cocaine, and it's very hard to – but it turns out the best remedy for cocaine addiction is coca, right? And it makes sense, right? It's sort of like methadone is to heroin.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
I mean, it's a different compound. But a simple extract of coca, people can take, chew it, or take it as mambay or even a tea. This is mostly going on in South America because, of course, a lot of cocaine addiction associated with producing coca is A lot of people are addicted to what's called pasta, which is the semi-pure form of coca. Effectively, it's crack cocaine.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
It's a smokable form halfway through the purification process. So they have a huge problem with cocaine addiction in Bolivia and Peru and these producing countries. And there are some doctors there that are conducting research, and it turns out that coca –
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
unrefined coca is a good remedy for cocaine addiction oh wow that's similar to the way that you know nicotine patches and nicotine chewing gum can help people get off cigarettes the same thing exactly same idea yeah that makes a lot of sense
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Yeah, the conference will be February 3 to 7. And then following that, actually in Cusco, we're going to have a – We're going to have an event at the end of the conference. People are going to go to Cusco. This is mainly for the conference attendees. We're going to show an amazing film about coca. that this anthropologist made in Cusco. And we may get another speaker to talk about Cusco.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
We're trying to give something back to the community because we've organized this conference. It's too expensive for most of the people who live in the Sacred Valley to come, so we're trying to... open it up in a way to the community.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
So that's what led us to go to La Charrera, you know, was in search of this drug, which was called Ukuhe. in Wetoto, and we got to La Charrera, and the whole adventure of getting there is recounted in the book. We got to La Charrera, and on the way into La Charrera, we'd encountered this anthropologist who was working with the Wetoto. We knew he was probably going to run into him.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
On the 8th of February, after the conference, we're going to do a mini film festival at this place called Zapiri, which is a shop in Cusco run by a British fellow that I know well. I've done events with him. It's called Zapiri Ground, and we're going to show this coca movie, which is called Cucucerai. I'm not sure I'm saying it about the Carol people, about how they use coca.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
We're going to show the McKenna's Academy movie, Bionosis. The subtitle is Bridges to Ancestral Wisdom. We're going to show another couple of films. So it'll be like an afternoon film festival. We're going to show the person that is filming the conference for us and doing a lot of the –
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
background work uh as a gentleman named louis solarat who is really a gifted filmmaker he used to be brian rose's uh producer okay uh in in be in but he's been living in peru ever since the pandemic and he's made a couple of amazing films one of which is called psychedelic pandemic about his experience being in peru with the when the uh when the pandemic came he went to Iquitos to take ayahuasca.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
But sometimes it synced. And we had, since you've read the book, and by the way, I should mention with the book, the copy I sent you is the original edition, 2012 edition. There's a new edition available now.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And he went to this retreat center and he figured he was going to be there a couple of weeks and then go back home. And then the COVID pandemic came down and the country was locked down. So his stay there extended from two weeks to five years. He's still there. And he's loving it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
He's still making amazing films. So we're going to show Psychedelic Pandemic. And he's made this other really interesting film called Ariana's Garden. which is about this young girl, and it's basically a fiction. It's a short film, but it's about this young girl who has a personal relationship with the plants, you know, and she talks to the plants, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And her grandmother or somebody like that in the family is ill. and uh you know they want to take the grandmother to lima for treatment and they're poor and they can't do it you know and so ariana you know goes into the garden and finds the plants to cure the mother and uh it's it's a very touching film so we're gonna show that and uh
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Well, I was going to say, so that segues into the bionosis. Could we talk about that a little bit? Yeah, of course. Okay, so under programs, this is a story as well. Okay. I have lots of stories. Okay. Are we doing okay? Herbarium. In terms of, yeah, this is about the herbarium. Oh, okay. Yes. Are we going over time limits?
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
I've totally lost track of time.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
You don't care. You could go all day. I could go all day.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Of course they would. I don't know. But yeah, so Bionosis is a project that we've been working on for... Depending on when you start counting. So I worked in my career, I worked very closely with this gentleman in Iquitos named Juan Ruiz, who was the curator of the herbarium at the university there. And I've known him for 50 years. We worked together. I came as a graduate student in 1981.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
He was a student there at the time, and he was, at the time, he was designated to be my guide, basically, by the guy who directed the herbarium at the time. And I'm sure... The conversation was basically, this gringo's here. He's an idiot. He's a tenderfoot. Just take him to the field and get some plants. Make sure he gets back alive. And he did.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
His colleagues in Bogota had said, you know, Dr. Collier is out there. You'll probably see him. This was, you know, you didn't send texts to people or anything. This was 1971. So we thought, okay, we'll probably encounter Dr. Collier. Well, we did. We ran into Horatio Collier, which is a different name than in the book. I've changed his name.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And we collected some plants, and we formed a friendship. And we've collaborated on various projects over the years. Juan is an amazing person. He is a scientist. He's a trained botanist, but he's also a medicine man. He understands the use of these plants, and he grew up in Iquitos, so he knows the communities and the communities around there on the rivers and so on. None of it's written down.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And it's all in his head. So partly this plan, if you can scroll up, there's a description of it. We have various aspects, various elements of this. What we want to do is make documentaries about this herbarium, which we have made. This Bionosis film, it's about a 30-minute film, is basically about the herbarium and what happens. what is being lost, the importance of the herbarium.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
The word?
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Herbarium is like a library of dried plant specimens. That's what it is, basically. The podcast I sent you from – what's the podcast? In Defense of Plants. That fellow is the director of the herbarium at the Missouri Botanical Garden. And the reason it blew my mind when I stumbled on that is the Missouri Botanical Garden has a very close relationship to this herbarium in Iquitos.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
One of their chief botanists at the time, Al Gentry, collected out of the UNAP herbarium at the Universidad Nacional Amazonía de Peruana in Iquitos. He collected out of there. So when I was looking for something else and saw this podcast, I thought, this is an amazing connection. I'm going to get in touch with him, see if we can initiate a collaboration. Because what we want to do...
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
is save this herbarium. And we want to start by digitizing the specimens there. And like the Missouri Botanical Garden, the specimens, there's like three million specimens there. At the UNAP herbarium, there's only 150,000, so a tiny amount. And only 50,000 of them are actually documented and mounted with labels and entered into the library. The rest of them haven't been mounted yet.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
So what we want to do is find the resources to mount the rest of the specimens and then digitize these specimens and put all that online and develop an interactive interface for examining the specimens. So this is what herbaria do these days. All of the major herbaria in the world digitizing their collections because then people could look at the specimens no matter where they are in the world.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
One of our advisors on this project was a woman named Barbara Thiers, Dr. Barbara Thiers from the New York Botanical Garden. She created a virtual herbarium at the New York Botanical Garden with four and a half million specimens in it. Wow. You know, so she knows what she's doing. Yeah. This shows, this is a trailer for the film. Uh, and I'll send you a link where you can look at the full film.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
That's only 30 minutes, but, but scroll up or down to show those pictures.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Yeah. Yeah. So this shows, uh, this is Wanda Reese and, uh, one of the document we want to make a series of documentaries but the main one is we want to try to document what this guy knows which is a tremendous amount you know he knows all this i think he has a personal relationship with all the plants in the amazon i mean he he knows all these species he could identify about sight
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
But we ran into him in a village downriver from La Charrera called El Encanto, which is coincidence enough, synchronicity enough, because El Encanto means mountain. The Enchanted, you know, and we were on this whole mythic quest to find the secret. And we talked to Dr. Collier, and when we got there, you have to understand, we were very much in the hippie mode.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And I've collected with him in the field many times. And he can take a leaf or a fragment of a plant often. And I often have given him these things. And he'll give you the scientific name, the common name, what it's used for. Usually some funny story about some botanist that came through 30 years ago and collected the plant. Wow. So he's just a wise man of the forest in some ways.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
The herbarium is closing. There's no money to keep it going. So what we're trying to do is find enough money to keep it going and document what Juan knows, you know, before he dies, because he's not young. I mean, he's like me. He's a couple years younger than I am, which is unfortunately not young. But so through this, we want, and we want to create a
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
interactive interface to these collections so that rather than going to the website and just looking at a bunch of specimens, which is fine. If you're a botanist, that's what you want. You want to just be able to get to them. But we want to make an AI and VR-driven interface for these things.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
We want to create a virtual reality interface so that instead of just looking at a bunch of specimens, you're actually looking at a virtual representation of the rainforest.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And you can... fly through the rainforest and in this VR, there will be little nodes and every node is keyed to an herbarium specimen, right? So you click on the node and you can bring up the specimen. And that will tell you what it is and where it is and who collected it and so on. But then that could also link to all sorts of other databases that are out there. Oh, that's incredible.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Genomic databases, phytochemical, ethnobotanical databases, and so on. So this is a big project. This is – And right now, Juan is retired. He's been forced to retire because the herbarium cannot – they just can't keep paying him, you know, even though he makes very little money. But, you know, as a – As a faculty member there, he makes, I don't know, probably less than $1,000 a month.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
But they can't afford it, and they've closed the herbarium. So this... This spring, after we get done with this COCA conference, we're planning to take some of these films and go on the road and do film festivals in different places. We have the person that made the Bionosis film has a studio in New Brunswick. Hemings House is the name of the company, so we're going to start there.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
He's got a venue identified where we can do it, and then we're going to Halifax, and then probably New York, and we have a chance to present at Princeton as well. So, we're trying to raise money to do the herbarium, and a big part of it is we're trying to raise money so that we can pay Juan a stipend so that he can continue to live in dignity. I mean, right now, he's in really tough shape.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
you know and he shouldn't have to be you know so we're trying to do that and when it comes to donors if people want to support this bionosis project Then sign on, and people can support anything that the Penn Academy is doing. I mean, we need support for the COCA project. We need support for bionosis, and these are basically our two big things. Bionosis is the most long-term one.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And anyone, you can go on the website. We've got donate buttons all over the place.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
We dressed like hippies, beads, bells, everything. You know, all that. So when these people, these crazy people show up in the village, Dr. Collier is like, who the fuck are these people? You know, and what are they here for? Why are they here? And when we said, we're here for Okuhe.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
That's the stuff that... But I must correct her. I must correct you.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
McKenna.academy.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
There's no .com. Academy is the suffix.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
and like all non-profits we got donate buttons and we can also give people uh tax deductions we're a 501c3 non-profit we can give people tax deductions uh if you're not in the states it's a little more complicated but you can still get a deduction right there right there once monthly yearly
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And one other key email here. Yeah, you can join our newsletter. Also, do connect. We do put out a newsletter. And I'm doing a podcast, actually. I am an amateur at this compared to you. I mean, you're the master. You're amazing. You've been going on podcasts since like the early 2000s. I have been doing podcasts. Finally, I decided I'll do my own damn podcast. And this is Louis Solorat.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
This is the guy, the filmmaker I was telling you about. Okay. So, yeah, the Brain Forest Cafe. And we try to do these podcasts every – we release one every other Monday. You know, we don't have the resources to do them. I mean, it takes – tremendous amount of focus and work to do these. You know you do these three or four times a week, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
I haven't done that. We can't afford to bring people in on purpose, in person. And besides, nobody wants to go to my messy office. But we got a lot of people here and some really good stuff.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Okay.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Well, I know most of the people involved in this. There's a couple of different places it's going on. There's one group in Boulder that's doing some work on this. Modesto Mindfulness is what they're called. A guy named Dan McQueen. And then there's a UK. There's a group in the UK. They're the ones that seem to be most involved with it. Chris Timmerman and some other folks. Well, it's a...
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Then he really freaked out, you know, and he's like, you can't just go in there and march in there and start asking for a coup hit. He said, you know, this is their biggest shamanic secret. I mean, they will probably kill you if you start talking about this. Well, you know, so we said, okay, doc, we understand. We'll be cool. We'll be discreet. We're not just going to, you know, ask for it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
It's a way to get around this problem that DMT is too short. You know, that's it. Extended state. The idea is you could extend the state. But instead of using the MAOI. Instead of using the MAOI.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Intervenous slow drip, and you can spend time in the DMT state. I was originally a skeptic about this. I was concerned.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Well, I was concerned that prolonged exposure to DMT, putting yourself in this very strange place for, I mean, one of the best things about DMT, it's very short. I mean, in 20 minutes, it's over. You can always look forward to that. Right. Just tell you, it's going to be over. Exactly. You can extend it for 40 minutes, an hour, whatever. I haven't done that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
For various health reasons, I probably won't do it. But I was skeptical that it might be dangerous, but I guess not. I mean, people are doing this. It seems to be okay. DMT is very non-toxic. And the reason it's so short is that it's so quickly metabolized. So you take it, and as soon as you take it, it starts disappearing from your system. So this is a way to keep the titers up. One approach...
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Well, there's a couple of approaches. One approach that could work without going the intravenous route that I have tried that worked pretty good is to do vaping, do a vaporizer, not like these cartridges, but use like a volcano vaporizer or something like that, you know, volcano vaporizer. Right, yeah. So...
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
If you can do that, if you can vaporize it, then you have this bag full of the smoke, right? So you can control it. The problem is you're so completely out of it, you don't want to have to fiddle with lighting matches and smoking pipes and this just... And what I found when I did it was it was very... It was great, actually.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
There was not this – it didn't come down on you like a freight train when you spoke it. That's been my experience. A very easy lift up into the place, very calm, tranquil. And then you could stay there. And if you wanted to go up higher, you'd just take another toke, you know, on the breath out of this bag. And the sand would float up there for a while, and then it would start to come down.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
It was literally like being in a balloon. That's the closest analogy I could give to it. Start to drift down, and you'd say, well, no, this feels pretty good. I think I'll go back up for a while. And you could just float along for a long time. And I haven't done the intravenous one, but it seems to me that this accomplishes the same thing. And it was really quite nice.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
I had one of the best DMT encounters I've ever had with that. Really? Yeah, yeah. I did because it was so… It was so non-threatening. It was so comfortable. I mean, often DMT, at least for me, taking it in the old way, I mean, it's a trip. You've got to get your courage screwed up and say, I'm going to do this. I'm going to plunge into the abyss. And
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
and hopefully the parachute will open, you know, and, plug your nose and jump. Yeah. There's a lot of anxiety, but this was like, there's no anxiety. It was like, this feels good. I could stay here for a while. I had a wonderful, uh, You know, an encounter with my ancestors and very much not so much about all the lights and bells and whistles that a typical DMT experience is.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Dr. Collier, I should mention, he was a good example of someone who had a problem with coca. He chewed so much coca. He's a little paranoid. He was paranoid about everything. But we said, okay, we'll be careful when we go. And to get from El Encanto to La Trera, we had to go over land. from the Rio Igaraparaná, which is where El Encanto was, to the Caraparaná.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
It was much more tranquil and mellow and actually just deep, you know, and I could just feel the love and no fear, no fear. That was... That was amazing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
It dissolves the filters?
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
It's something like that. I mean, this thing, you know, you get into some pretty interesting epistemological, you know, areas here. Like you say, is it real, right? I start with the premise that anything you experience is real, you know?
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
yeah it's real you experience it you know an alien appears there on uh you know in the chair and oh okay hello well it may not actually be physical presence but you're experiencing it so it's real right anything you experience it is real you know so All this talk about all these paranormal phenomena, UFOs and whatever. They're real. People experience them. But then, that's just the first step.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Then, okay, is it within or is it without? What does that mean? Is there really a within or a without? Are these things – because again, we talked before about the reality hallucination. We're in the – we are in a simulation. That's what the brain does. It simulates reality. So everybody's in a reality simulation. Their own personal –
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
You know, their own personal simulation, their own personal reality hallucination, which fortunately happens to overlap with other people's. It's pretty congruent with other people's, so it makes sense. Otherwise, we'd all be isolated. I mean, presumably there's something out there that we all share, but we're seeing this –
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Everything we experience is a reflection of our neurochemical brain states, basically. And you can tweak it various ways, with drugs or whatever, with feedback, with meditation, with shamanic practices, with sound even. You can alter states. But everything filters through that neurochemical process.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Right. And I admit I am puzzled by that. I am not sure quite what to say about that. I think it's very interesting that people do see the same thing. I think it is a leap to go from that to say, well, this proves that we're living in a simulation.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
I think that's quite a leap, you know.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
uh but then you know you know in science uh and again science is You know, it doesn't have all the answers, but the scientific stance or the sort of scientific attitude is the application of Occam's razor is a good thing. You know, Occam's razor basically said, what is the... The easiest explanation. What explains the data? What is the most likely explanation that explains the data?
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
You know, so it's a leap to go from these people's experiences and say, oh, that proves the world that... You know, the world's a simulation, which means we have to dump into the dumpster everything we thought we knew about the world, and people are reluctant to do that. I'm not sure exactly.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
There was a four-day trail that we had to travel to get to this parallel river where La Charrera was. And it was a trail that had been made in the rubber boom days to transport rubber out of this area and, you know, built on slavery and, you know, very, very dark history of that period. But we went over that trail and we got to La Charrera. And we thought, well, okay, so here we are, you know,
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
I think it may have to do with what we were talking about before about the collective unconscious and the fact that we're all connected. by this bedrock of the collective unconscious. I think the Jungian notion of these archetypes in some realm, and we're just islands sticking up out of this ocean, but at the bedrock we're all connected.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
That may be where these things reside, and that's where... It's not unlike the Platonic ideas about Plato's notion of the... I mean, I think his idea for that was the ideas, the shadows in the cave, that whole thing, that what we're seeing is shadows in the cave. Yes, yes. I like the Jungian notion. It makes sense. So maybe there is some place where –
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
the universal determinants of language, cognition, understanding, all of these things are shared commonly not through cultural filters. What we see is always comes through a cultural filter. Maybe there's something behind that that's more fundamental. And DMT lets you look into that space temporarily.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. I mean, it's just a speculation. Again, the question is how do you prove that? How do you prove that's where it's coming from? One thing I've always been a little sort of uncomfortable with or – I belong to a chat group called Sentient Others, and we've had several conferences, and that's a group in the UK mainly, and we've talked about…
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
It's basically about these entities that you encounter in these altered states, particularly DMT. These alien-like entities that appear to be separate, that want to communicate with you. And one thing that bothers me a little bit about those things you see is They look like humans. I mean they look basically like humans. They don't – there's a book that's been published recently.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
It's called something like A Field Guide to Alien Entities or something like that. I'll send you the PDF. It's quite interesting. But you look at all these – It's an attempt to kind of classify them. It's like a taxonomy of these different entities that you see. And it's a good effort. But I look at them, and most of them have a more or less humanoid form. And so this suggests to me that –
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
These are like dreams. These come from within. These come from the unconscious. They don't necessarily represent anything out there. There's something buried deep in the unconscious is a possibility. Where it gets kind of interesting is some of these things don't look human at all. And then you wonder, what about the octopoid ones? What about the insectoid ones? Those kinds of things.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Now maybe we're getting somewhere. Because there's no reason to think that – like we were talking about aliens before. There's no reason to think that aliens are going to look like us.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
You know, I mean, the short answer is I don't know. I don't know. I think that, yes, I think sometimes these are things that happen to people in hypnagogic states, in sleeping states, in dreams. I mean, you've had very vivid dreams, right? And I guess we all have. And there are people that are involved in lucid dreaming. And it's just hard to say. It's just hard to say. And that's good.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
I don't think there are any definitive answers to any. At least we don't have them yet. Have you ever read Oliver Sacks' book on hallucinations? No, I haven't. That's worth reading. You wouldn't believe what people see.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Yeah, Oliver Sacks. Yeah, it's a short book. There's a whole documented clinical literature about what people see. Check out, I think it's Charles Bennett syndrome is one of these syndromes that's been studied by neurologists. I think it's Charles Bennett syndrome. Named after this guy. Is that what it is? Yeah, there you are. Charles Bonnet syndrome. That's right. Memory fails me.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Well, there were no landing strips. There were sea planes, you know, river planes. But we're, you know, hard. We're poor hippies. We can't afford planes, you know. Right, right. And, you know, so that wasn't an option. But we got there. And at the time we got there, there were – it's a mission. It's a mission. A Capuchin mission was there.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Right, right. And there's one case study that they talk about, about this guy. Maybe it was Charles Bonnet or someone that had this condition. But every night... he would see a full brass band would march through his room. Wow. With full lights and sound effects and everything. And this was like a nightly occurrence. And it was like he was not upset. He looked forward to it. He enjoyed it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Yeah. So hallucination –
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
I thank you for asking me.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
First week of February. Yeah. Yeah. Much appreciate that. Get people to look at the website. Oh, a couple of things. If anyone wants to connect on the summit or anything else, they can always email Annette at McKenna.academy. She is the conference coordinator, and she basically does everything for us. A lot of other things for the Academy so that I can just come out here and rave.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
She's the one that actually makes sure it works, you know.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
So she's a wonderful person. Shout out to Annette. She'll be very, yeah, A-N-N-E-T-T-E. Annette at McKenna.Academy. And also I do want to thank my whole team at the Academy. Just amazing humans, you know, really fine people. And we're having fun, you know. We're having a lot of fun. And I have to say, this has been a blast.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Thanks for the invitation.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Absolutely.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
There's a church and a little mission school where the Watoto kids would come basically to have their minds poisoned with Christianity. But it was between semesters or it was on vacation, so there were a lot of empty huts in the area. So they just said, you can stay in one of these huts while you're doing whatever you're doing. And by the way, what are you doing?
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Yeah. There's a new edition from Synergetic Press, and it came out a couple years ago, and it's exactly the same as the old edition, except there's a 50-page addendum, which kind of updates it. So if people want the new edition, they should buy it from Synergetic Press. Okay. You get one of the rare – original copies.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And we were sort of, you know, we're botanists. We're looking for plants, you know. And so we got settled in into this place. Thought, well, you know, we will respect what Dr. Collier said. We'll not just go out. We'll hope somebody shows up that looks like maybe we could ask about this ukulele. Well, as it turned out, it was the rainy season.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And for the first – around this mission, around a couple hundred acres had been cleared. The rainforest had been cleared. And they brought in these Cebu cattle, white humpback cattle, right? And the shit of those cattle happens to be the preferred substrate for psilocybe cubensis. The pan-tropical psilocybin mushroom, which is big and robust, and it was rainy.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And there were huge clusters of these mushrooms growing out basically out of every cow pie. And we thought, wow. And we knew what they were. We had no experience with them. We'd had one... very brief experience on the way in at a village along the river, but just a very light dose because it was a, you know, it was a dry day. By the time we got to La Torreira, these things were everywhere.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And we had looked, we knew our, we had done our homework, we knew what the mushrooms were, but experience-wise, we were very naive. And we thought, well, That's great. We could enjoy these. We were completely casual about it. We were completely cavalier.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
We'll have a good time with these while we're waiting for this ukuhe to show up, waiting for the secret to surface, you know, from some informant. So we began eating these mushrooms. And we began eating them rather frequently and rather high doses. For one thing, they became part of our diet, you know, because there wasn't a whole lot to eat. And the mushrooms quickly.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Well, not breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but daily or every other day and quite substantial doses, you know, and like 10, 15 mushrooms at a time. And these things are potent, you know, in that environment. They are extremely potent. But we loved this. I mean, it was a fantastic thing. But the mushrooms quickly made it clear that they were the real secret.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
They were what we had come for, not knowing it. wasn't the real secret as it turned out. And later we did access Ukuhe and Ukuhe turned out to be fairly disappointing in terms of its effects. But the mushrooms were like, this is the most fantastic psychedelic we've ever experienced, you know? And, uh, You have no experience with psychedelics.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Well, you know DMT and psilocybin is very, very close chemically.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Right. Well, DMT is dimethyltryptamine. Cannabis is 4-phosphoryl dimethyltryptamine. So it's the perfect genetically engineered orally active form of DMT. It's easily absorbed. It's orally active. It doesn't require monoamine oxidase inhibitors to be active. It's non-toxic and it's a kick-ass psychedelic, you know, and it puts you in about a six to seven hour
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
intense psychedelic space, depending on how much you eat, of course. We were eating a lot. Full visionary hallucinations and all that. One thing that psilocybin does, and other psychedelics too, ayahuasca for example, but one thing psilocybin does, it sets up what you might call an I-thou relationship with you. It's like you get the impression that you are dealing with an intelligent entity.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
You know, that this isn't just a drug. This is, well, our interpretation was it was some sort of, it either was an alien or it was a connection to an alien. It comes on as very in your face and it has stuff that it wants to tell you.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Exactly, exactly. And it has a lot of knowledge, and it's eager to impart it. People get this on DMT, too. In prolonged DMT or intense DMT states, people encounter entities – And it's not that they just encounter entities. The entities are happy to see you, and they have stuff to tell you. They want to teach you things. And the psilocybin is that to the max.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And our encounters with the mushrooms quickly became... a series of encounters with this entity which we called the teach. We called it the teacher because it presented itself as a teacher and it had knowledge that it wanted to impart. Now, I told myself I wasn't going to go down this rabbit hole with you, but I guess we have to. I'm hooked in. We have time. I'm strapped in and ready to go.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
We have time, and this is maybe essential to the story.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
But the book was... Yeah, I wanted to tell my side of the story, basically, with the book and recount our whole lives. You know, many people are familiar with Terrence's book, True Hallucinations, which was published about 1993. And that really focuses on our trip to La Charrera, that whole adventure that we had down in Colombia, which –
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
So we were in this place eating these mushrooms and more or less in constant dialogue with this entity, the teacher. And... In that state, the mushroom really stimulates verbosity and quick thinking and linguistic expression and all this. And we were a very verbose, language-oriented bunch of folks anyway. We were very much interested in language.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
For example, my brother's favorite book of all time was Finnegan's Wake, if you've ever heard of that. Finnegan's Wake? Yeah. By – I forget who – Jesus. I can't – you know.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
You have to look it up. James Joyce. James Joyce. James Joyce. That's right. Oh, yeah. That's it. It's nice to have Google right there. That's good. Yes, check out. Terrence was obsessed with James Joyce and with Finnegan's Wake particularly. I've not read it. I'm honest. I have to honestly tell you. But he read it, and very few people could understand it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
But it is the sort of ultimate instantiation of the English language.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Yeah. But anyway, so that was sort of the background we were coming from. And so the mushrooms had all this information that they wanted to download. And I particularly began to get –
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
effectively a message from the mushroom well one one thing that we noticed with the mushrooms when you take these high doses is that at high doses you can hear this interior sound that in inside your head and it's hard to characterize it's kind of like an electrical buzzing sound you You heard it on DMT, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
That's it. Some people describe it as like crackling cellophane or something like that. On DMT, you get this. Well, on mushrooms, at high doses, not so much at lower doses, but at high doses, you hear this thing. And not only can you hear it, but you can sing it. You can try to imitate it with your voice. You can make this nyow, nyow, nyow, nyow song.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And at a certain point, your voice will lock onto this thing. And so then you're not trying to imitate it, it just pours out of you. And it's a very powerful sound. I mean, it's like the kind of sound that can shatter glass, that kind of thing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
which we're more or less famous for, in some ways more infamous for. With this book, I wanted to tell a broader story about our lives, our childhoods, how we got interested in all this, and sort of what that ensued to, what was the sequelae of that. And of course, as siblings... As siblings do, we squabble constantly, you know, when I was a kid.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
we experienced this with the mushrooms and and also with dmt but we experienced that you could make this sound and it just seemed to have a certain resonance that actually you know had this effect and so we thought well what is this the mushroom and the mushroom is saying well what this is is it's a it's a frequency that can activate the DNA in your neural system
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
and actually create a standing waveform of your DNA to create, I mean, I'm skipping details here, but the basic idea was that if you project this sound at a mushroom in the right circumstances, you can actually activate the DNA in yourself and the mushroom and create an external standing waveform that you can actually see.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
So it is an artifact that you're making out of your body and your mind and your brain and your DNA and the mushroom and this thing. in religious traditions was, if there's any analogy to it, it's effectively the resurrection body. We wanted to create this artifact. You would both see it and be it at the same time. You know, it would be something external to you that you would observe.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
We envisioned that it would be, you know, a purplish-violet glowing disk, basically. But it would be telepathic, and it would obey your telepathic commands, and it would be the ultimate object. It would be, in fact, what Terence has since called the transcendental object at the end of time. And we thought that this was how you could create this thing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Well, 50 years from now, downstream from all that, I understand. We were just nuts, you know, because obviously it didn't happen. I mean, we tried to create this thing. And the prediction was that once we created it, it would propagate through basically space-time and would collapse the space-time matrix.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And it would end history and, you know, we'd all move into the singularity, you know, pretty much instantaneously. Right. Talk about messianic inflation. This was messianic inflation on steroids. The mushroom was downloading all this stuff, like the blueprints how to do this. To me, it was like I was writing furiously, this is the procedure, what we must do. We must take mushrooms.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
We must include ayahuasca in there because there needs to be harming in this mix because harming is the resonator. Harming actually, in ayahuasca, it's the MAO inhibitor that activates DMT. But in this particular instantiation, it was the intercalator. Harming intercalates into DNA. Okay. And this is known. This is scientific fact. It intercalates into DNA.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
So Harming became the resonator, the antenna effectively, that could set up this standing waveform. And the instructions were downloaded, and it was like, this is what you have to do. You have to sing to the mushroom in this way, in this very, very controlled situation, and you will create this artifact. I don't normally cop to this.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
I mean, yeah, you're looking at me like, gee, should I call somebody? Hold on. I mean, I'm sane.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
At the time, I was. Well, so we did this, right? Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
i performed this experiment and the prediction was that this was going to happen well obviously it couldn't happen it would violate every law of physics known you know if this had happened but we now would this thing hypothetically only appear when you're under the influence of psilocybin mushrooms or dmt or would this actually appear when you're not under the influence
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And my brother was very creative in finding many ways to torture me. You know, I mean, he was a master of psyops and all that. And he was, you know, I mean, he didn't actually physically beat me. He was more subtle than that. But he could scare the bejesus out of me. And he did.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Our supposition was that once it was there, it would be there. And it would be something that would be controlled by thought. And it would have access to all information and it would have access to all effectively throughout the cosmos. It would have – It would be a standing waveform like an electron in some ways. The electron doesn't have a boundary. Its boundary is space-time itself.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
This would be like that. But there would be a physical part of it that we could actually – that would be – Like a time machine. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
a time everything an everything machine everything a time machine a ufo machine the transcendental object at the end of time the ultimate technology you know that would be made from our brains our nervous system our thought and that of the the mushroom and uh that you know this would be
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
this would be it this would well that didn't happen that couldn't happen we we did the experiment and uh at first we're doing this in the dark in the in the hut and there's there's a light you know on on the mushroom in front of it and and after I'd made the third You probably read about this, right, in the book after I'd made the third.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Then the light from my Ruana, my Serapi, fell on the mushroom and exactly bisected it. And I was looking at it and I looked at Terrence and I said, this is our world. This is what we're looking at. And it did. We had this idea that this was all being controlled by, you know, dome-headed beings from 22,000 miles out in orbit that they were directing the whole thing, you know.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And I said, this is our world. And so what happened was, because what we projected couldn't possibly happen, but what happened was that I basically detached from reality, you know, for about two weeks. And Terrence detached from reality also, but in a different way.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
In a complementary way, this was about taking a template, kind of a reverse negative image of each other's DNA, because we were brothers, right? And it was opposite. It's very hard to articulate. It was hard to articulate it even then. But even more so now because I'm so distant from it. At the time, it made perfect sense. It made perfect sense to Terence and me that this had happened.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And at the end of this experiment, we thought we have succeeded. We succeeded, but the timing of the appearance of this stone – we thought of it as a stone, as in philosopher's stone – the timing for the appearance of this art attack, basically we were, we were correct. We were incorrect about when it was going to manifest. You know, it wasn't going to, it didn't manifest immediately.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Psychological torture. And he took great pleasure in doing that, you know. But eventually I became sort of immune to it. And then I would sort of, you know, push back. And, you know, but I mean we had – This relationship, which actually, we became closer after he left home. He left to go to high school in California when he was a junior. And so all of a sudden, I was effectively an only child.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
So the question is, well, when, when is it going to show up? You know, and, uh, Our companions who were there who hadn't participated in this experiment were like appalled, totally appalled.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
We need to get these people airlifted out of there and into a psychiatric facility as soon as possible. But it wasn't possible. Sorry, go ahead. It's good that it wasn't possible because that would have aborted what was happening. And that would have –
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
I have no doubt that if that had happened, that would have left me at least insane, probably for the rest of my life, lost in this delusional place. I don't know what it would have done to Terrence, but the fact that we could not end it. Gave it all a possibility – the opportunity to play out. And what played out over about the next 10 days or so was that Terrence, I became adrift in the cosmos.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
I was basically – And my mind felt that I felt – well, there wasn't really an I anymore. But this entity that I transformed myself into felt like I was – my circumference was identical with the circumference of the universe. I was – you've heard about being one with the cosmos. Well, man, I was one with the cosmos. I was the cosmos. But over the next 10 days or so, I began to condense.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Each 24 hours, I started falling back together. And each 24 hours, I was a little more relaxed. condensed, like it started with the circumference of the cosmos, the next it was the galactic cluster, the next it was the galaxy, the next the solar system, the next earth, and each one I was sort of coming back into my body and into my mind. And Terence simultaneously
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
So I was three sheets to the wind. I couldn't look after myself. 10 days you said this was. I forget the exact time frame.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
It was about 10 to 14 days.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Well, people had to look after me, you know. And because I was joined to everybody, like my companion, for example, if I wanted to smoke a cigarette, I would ask Sarah to smoke a cigarette. And I could enjoy the cigarette that she was smoking. Or if I want, you know, because I was connected to everybody, you know. Or if I needed to take a shit, I could ask somebody else to do it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And they would do it. in my mind, of course, not in reality, but in my mind. And so I was really divorced from what we would call reality. My brother simultaneously was hypervigilant. He did not sleep for 14 days. And he was constantly keeping an eye on me. He was looking after me, you know. That's probably why I wasn't sleeping. I mean, it was probably, I've often joked, you know, well,
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
You know, you've been trying to drive me crazy all of your life. Now you finally succeeded. So don't you feel guilty about that? And in fact, I think he probably did. And he was looking after me. He was making sure that no harm would come to me. But at the same time, he wasn't sleeping. And he was... wandering the pastures day and night, mostly at night, just wandering the pastures.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And he was thinking about time, thinking about cycles, thinking about the timing of this event related to the death of our mother, which had taken place like six months previously. And And projecting time in the forward and he was making all these diagrams on the ground with sticks about time cycles and all that. And eventually –
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
those ideas became condensed or evolved into what became his theories about time wave zero. The time map effectively based on I Ching, but it took years to get to that point. But the kernel of that idea –
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
2012. And where that date came from came out of our – expectation of when was the stone going to appear. And in the early days there, when we were both still completely batshit and all this was happening, he used to take me to the pasture every morning and he'd say, give it to me. Give it to me. Make it happen. I don't know. What am I supposed to do?
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
But it was like we were trying to force the condensation of the stone. Eventually, I came back more or less to normal, and he did too. During that period, he also had this encounter with a UFO. I don't know if you've read that part.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
This was early. This was like 1962. Well, I had my own room. That was great. But I was lonely. And I was sort of... At that point, I began to realize what a true sort of soulmate he was, how much I loved him, even though there was constant fighting. But when he was away, I began to appreciate him. And I began to really look forward to his visits back at Christmas and summer and so on.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And by the Choro, which was this waterfall, that's what La Torreira is named for, looking across the river. And there were clouds across the river, and they started to roil and boil. And then this UFO condensed out of the clouds. You know, and I didn't see this, so I can't vouch that it happened. You know, but I believe it probably did.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
It came out of the clouds and, you know, he was obviously terrified. And it, you know, making the usual flying saucer noises. And it was one of these things – It was an absurdity. It was the exact – other UFO researchers, people like Jacques Vallée and so on have always talked about how there's an element of the absurd in a lot of these experiences. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And this was that because the flying saucer was an exact representation of Adamski's flying saucer, which he had talked about, which he actually made a photograph of, which was shown to be a fake made from a Hoover vacuum cleaner. Yeah. What's it called?
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
adamski george adamski he was a famous ufo nut back and back at this time and talked about ufos and and was you know probably just crazy uh like i should talk right but uh find his ufo it was uh yeah george adamski there you go do you have a picture of his ufo
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
uh yes that's a picture of his ufo yes it was that it was that ufo oh wow exactly god the internet is a wonderful thing or maybe not but but yeah it was that ufo and it was it was coming at terence low and it was humming and it was very threatening you know and he was like what the and He was terrified. And then it just went over and that was it. And I don't believe Terrence made this up.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Why would he? Unless just to tell a good story and it's possible. I mean he was always – Always happy to tell a good story. I can't verify it. But why? Why would that happen? So this was just one of many anomalous things that was happening during this period. We were telepathic. We could understand each other. Our companions, like I say, were appalled.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
But Terry and I were in telepathic communication. What we were doing made perfect sense to us. We understood. And so a lot of what we were trying to do was to manifest – not only this artifact, but this thing that comes out of the sound, which we call translinguistic matter, a new kind of language where to say something was to see something.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
The unification of visual and auditory energy, so that if you spoke in this translinguistic language, You could manifest something, like casting a spell, you know, effectively. To say it was to make it. Crazy stuff, you know, and –
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
No, no. We'd stopped taking mushrooms.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
This was whatever we'd triggered. Yeah, we weren't taking mushrooms anymore. We didn't have to take mushrooms. This was not about being on mushrooms. We'd done the mushrooms, and maybe at toxic levels, maybe they were continuing in our system. But their half-life is short. They don't last days. They last hours. And so, no, this was some – if you want to look at it biochemically –
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
go the reductionist route for a minute. What did we do? We took a lot of mushrooms. We made this sound. We may have jammed open some system in the neural system, maybe prolonged monoamine oxidase inhibition or something like that. If we want to reach out for a reductionist explanation, it could have been some kind of serious neural disruption of our neurochemistry.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And eventually that re-equilibrated and we came down, more or less. It took a while. Even, well, So to continue this story and sort of how it played out, I was pretty much dissociated for a long time. Terrence was looking after me. All our companions were worried. And I always wanted to wander off. I wanted to go wander off because I needed to be out there healing people, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
I mean, that was my thing. I had this messianic desire to share my powers, you know, and heal people. Well, one day I got away from them. And I climbed the bell tower of the mission. And I started ringing the bell. And the whole community was alarmed, you know. I mean, they already knew that these people were weird and there was very strange stuff going on.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And we discovered that we had these mutual interests. And one of the main interests that sort of fascinated us as a continuing carrot was science fiction. I mean, that was the thing. We were serious science fiction nerds. And when psychedelics came along or began to come along in the 60s, You know, we were fascinated by this because we were both like nerds.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
We had really disrupted the peace of the community, but I broke that. And they was like, what the fuck? Who is this guy? He's clearly gone bananas. And so they – They said, you know, your friend is not in control and for his own good, we're going to confine him. The police – it was a police outpost as well as a mission. We're going to put him in this room here and keep him there for a while.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Hopefully, he'll fall down. He'll calm down. Not in any way, just trying to be helpful basically, not unkind. And I could care less because I wasn't really connected to it. And at the same time, about that time, one of our companions who had not participated in that, she was concerned and she was thinking that we needed to get out of there. And she also sprained her ankle rather badly.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
So that was sort of a trigger. It's like, okay, enough of this nonsense. We're going to call in a plane and have you guys airlifted out of here. We're going to get airlifted out of here, which we could do. There's radio. There was a bush pilot that would come deliver mail occasionally to La Charrera like about once a month. So we put in an emergency call to him saying,
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And he took us out and we went to Laetitia and we ended up in this hotel for a while. And I'm still, you know, really pretty shaky. And Terrence, but Terrence, because he's hypervigilant, he was, you know, looking after everything. Spent a few days in that hotel and eventually, you know, continued this condensation process and pretty much returned to more or less my baseline.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And then I, you know, we went back to Bogota and I arranged to come home. And at this point, I was like... I don't want anything to do with this. I just want to be a normal guy. I just want to get my feet on the ground. I don't know what was going on. But whatever it was, I'm glad I'm sane.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
I'm glad I'm functional, and I want to go home, and I want to study, return to the university, and just live my life. So I did eventually go back. I changed my studies from what I had been studying. It was basically anthropology and religious studies, that sort of thing. But I started studying chemistry. I started studying harder sciences.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
I studied biology, pharmacology, chemistry, all that stuff. Part of the motivation for that was that Terence was saying, and even before we'd done the experiment, but afterwards, definitely, he was saying, you know, science will never explain this, you know. And I was saying, well, wait a minute. We're not scientists, you know. So you can't say that until we know how to do science, you know.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
You can't really dismiss science. And so I thought, I'm going to study science. And that was kind of what put me on that trajectory. Terrence, on the other hand, was convinced that we had succeeded and that the timing of this
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
that effectively we were – that the timing of the appearance of this or this anomaly in the cosmic space time stream, we've just been wrong about when it was going to happen. So in some sense, I mean it sounds cruel to say and I don't mean it to – he persisted for years with the idea that we had succeeded. And he built the time wave around this idea. And he built a career around this.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And he was such a persuasive speaker that he got a lot of people to buy into it. And I was pretty much a skeptic at the time. I've always been kind of a skeptic of the time wave. I think the time wave... was a beautiful mathematical construction of the – around the I Ching. It is not a picture of – it's not a map of time. It doesn't have any predictive qualities.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
It works very well as a calendar and if he left it at that, he would have been – he would have gotten a lot of recognition from sinologists and scholars of the I Ching but not much else.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
But by insisting that it predicted, you know, this eruption of this anomaly in the space-time and there were many dates along the way that were identified, you know, with like cometary passages and this sort of thing, kept revising the dates and eventually settled on this date of
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
You know, we were fascinated with weird shit, basically. When psychedelics came along, we knew about it. We were fascinated by it. But a lot of people who became interested in psychedelics in that era were – they approached it from the standpoint of a traditional use or shamanism or therapeutic use or – You know, that sort of approach, you know, that it was a spiritual thing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
December 21st, 2012, you know, which it didn't hurt that he arrived at that date independently by looking at all these maps, the 384-day cycles based on the I Ching. 384 days is 6 times 64, right? And the I Ching is all about sixes and multiples of sixes because of the hexagrams.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
So, he settled on this date of December 21st, 2012, and then it came to his attention that that was actually a very key date in the Mayan calendar, the end of the 13th Bakhtun, in which another one of these world transitions was predicted in the Mayan calendars. Not the end of the world, but some people interpret it that way.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
So he thought, well, that's affirmation that, you know, we're on the right track here. So we'll set that as the end date. And it should happen at that time. And, well, he didn't live to see it, you know. But there was a lot of excitement about that date because of the Mayans and largely because of the memes that Terrence had released into the memosphere.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
A lot of people were excited about that date and they expected something to happen. As you know, there were watch parties. People were going down to Palenque and places like this to wait for it and so on. I remember. Nothing happened. You know, it was like the biggest non-event in human history. You know, so that was, to my mind, that was the definitive moment.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
you know, invalidation of the time wave. I mean, Terrence and I used to have – we used to argue about the time wave or shall we say have lively discussions because I was a skeptic and I was saying for all sorts of reasons, this doesn't really – it's not really a map of time, you know. I mean, the idea was that the wave – describe the aggression of novelty into the continuum.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
This is a concept that goes back to Alfred North Whitehead. Alfred North Whitehead talks about novelty as something that appears. Novelty is Novelty is basically that every day something happens that never before occurred in the history of the universe. You know, novel events, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And the time wave is an attempt to chart the ingression of novelty into the continuum, the ingression of novel events, and to quantify them, you know? And that was what it supposedly did, charted novelty.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And the end of the time wave was the ultimate ingression of novelty when this would all collapse into a singularity because the cycles were a spiral getting tighter and tighter all the time, right? Going back really billions of years or even trillions of years. But in the last nanoseconds of the time wave – everything was going to just collapse. It would be a complete transformation.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And so that was the theory. That was the idea.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Right. And the fractal nature of time. All of these cycles were fractals of each other getting tighter and tighter and tighter until finally they're basically nanoseconds and even less. So it's like a... You know how a black hole is a singularity based on mass, and if it's small enough, you get a singularity. Well, this was a temporal singularity.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
This was the collapse of the temporal continuum into something that could not be described by the laws of physics. And Terence and I used to have these conversations and I would say, well, Terence, the problem is – the problem with the time wave theory is that you cannot – it can't be disproven, right? You cannot define the criteria that would disprove it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
We were science fiction nuts. We approached it as an engineering problem. We thought, especially with DMT. I mean, DMT quickly rose in our pantheon to being the ultimate psychedelic, you know. And we thought, this stuff, this is not a drug. This is a portal to another dimension. That was the way that we thought of it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And so it's not a theory, because this is what science does, right? Science constructs hypotheses. It constructs suppositions, essentially. highly structured suppositions about a phenomenon in nature or some process and so on. And if you practice science honestly, you construct a hypothesis and then you say, you try like hell to demolish it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Now, you try to say, what data does this not account for? What are the incompletenesses? What are the deficiencies in the hypothesis? And then you either try to answer those, you elaborate the hypothesis, you revise it, try to account for the data that it doesn't account for, or you shit can the whole thing and replace it with something else.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
This is like the transition between Newtonian mechanics and relativity. I mean, Einstein came up with relativity and And in the normal experience of reality that we experience on the macro level, Einstein-Newtonian mechanics works perfectly well. But at these relativistic dimensions and speeds and so on, that all falls apart. And it's real.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And Einstein came along and he said, well, this experience, this relativity explains this. We know it doesn't appear to make sense because we're not in that relativistic places all the time. But this does actually explain it. And so in science, this happens. You know, one paradigm gives away to another as new information comes available.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And that's what we were postulating was that – or what Terence was postulating. Well, so the time wave failed its definitive test. December 21st, 2012 came along and nothing happened. And that was kind of the ultimate test that he'd postulated.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
I mean, all of this – I mean, here's the thing in science. You never prove anything. All hypotheses, all scientific – science is simply a way of asking very structured questions about nature. You never prove your hypotheses. Because there always may be data that comes in next week, next month, 50 years from now, 100 years ago that invalidates your hypothesis.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
All you can say is based on the data that we have, what we know now, this hypothesis, whatever it is, appears to be valid. That's the way science works. And that was what was lacking in Terence's construct. He was arguing, he was trying to prove it. And you don't ever – you don't arrive at proof. All you can do is say what we suppose, the hypothesis that we've constructed, we can't disprove it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And I guess you could say that, but the thing is there's not enough – the time wave in itself doesn't have – enough data to really be able to say that because in some ways it's – there are holes in it. There are big holes that you can drive a truck through. For example, it does not take account of relativity. It does not take – if it's a model of time,
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Like the work that the guy that you had on the podcast, time is not something that applies to the entire universe. There are regions where time is different than where it is now. That's why the idea of time travel is actually a possibility. But the time wave is like, nope, this is it. This describes the entire space-time continuum. And it didn't, obviously.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
That was in the future.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And there are other things that, well, actually, again, it's, you know, I don't want to feel like I'm putting my, I don't want to sound like I'm putting my brother down. I mean, I had tremendous respect for him. And he was a brilliant guy. But the way he was trying to true of the time wave, the time wave was more about him than it was about time.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
There was LSD. There was mescaline. And there was DMT. There wasn't much DMT around, but it was there. DMT is a very simple molecule. It's very easy to make. There were underground chemists making DMT. And when my brother was living in Berkeley, originally in Los Altos where he was going to high school, he had connections. He had actually one –
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
It was about his personality, his understanding of history. Which was, you know, deep. I mean, he was an incredible scholar of history. And it was about, you know, one of the things that we used to have in our conversations about novelty was what is really novel? What is novelty?
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And we talked about, I mean, and he said, well, events like the first time an atomic bomb was ever detonated on the earth. That's a novel event. So that would be a spike. That would be a major marker to put down in this evolution of novelty or the first time an animal was cloned or various kinds of scientific discoveries. But I would say –
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
So he was sort of a proponent of the eruptive idea of novelty. Things burst into the continuum, you know, and are these novel events. And I advocated the idea that novelty kind of leaks into the continuum. It kind of oozes into the continuum. For example – You couldn't get to the atomic bomb.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Einstein had to have the idea first about E equals MC squared and then all these physicists came along and they developed nuclear reactions, controlled nuclear reactions, all of these things. These were novel events but they didn't get a lot of attention. But they created the foundation of new discoveries so that when the bomb finally exploded –
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
It was possible to develop that because the foundation of understanding was there. And those were novel discoveries, but they weren't dramatic in that way. Am I making sense here?
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
So novelty is there all the time.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Exactly. And this was – so Terrence – You know, he approached this. He was not a mathematician, although the time wave is a mathematical construct. He was not a statistician, which would have been useful, you know, to bring the theory to it. He was basically a historian. And his – so he was mapping with this time wave was his – view of history. And there are maps of the time wave.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
I think they're reproduced in True Hallucinations. These huge maps and the idea that time is fractal, that every cycle is a reflection of... the supercycles and the subcycles so that you could see these historical resonances. And it's a fascinating idea. It is. And in some sense, it's true, but I don't think you can reduce it to –
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
A mathematical construct that you can, you know, I mean, people have put the time wave into software and you can run all sorts of programs and so on. But at the end of the day, it's Terence's view of history that's being mapped, you know.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Terrence was a complex person. Yeah. Very complex person. I think a few things drove him. I think that... First, it was just curiosity. I mean, there was no motivation, really, except an interest in understanding. And he was having these revelations, and they seemed valid, and he was taking psychedelics. And he was just a curious person, and that's a very good quality in a scientist.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
One of his closest friends was one of his classmates, a fellow named Rick Watson, who was another super genius weirdo. And Rick Watson was a chemist, and he was actually an amateur chemist, but he had some connections with the Stanford Research Institute. And the Stanford Research Institute was working with DMT, as it turned out at that time.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Or anyone else. I mean, I don't think he would call himself a scientist because he dismissed science. He said science is never going to answer this. But I think eventually he reached a point where It became a shtick. You know, he built a career on this. And talking about the time wave and talking about psychedelics and being such an excellent speaker.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
You know, I used to tell him, you could stand up there and read the phone book and people would be hanging on every word. Yeah. Because it's not what you say, it's how you say it. And I used to tell him, he hated for me to go to his seminars and so on, because I was the only one that would ever stand up and say anything.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Everybody else is just slack-jawed, and I would sometimes get up and say, well... What you said 20 minutes ago didn't make sense, you know, and what you say now doesn't make sense. And it exactly contradicts what you just said. And he would just say, well, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, you know, and just carry on.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Oh, wow. So it became an act in a certain way. And it was a career. People wanted to listen to him. Honestly, his best talks were... not about the Brothers McKenna or the time wave idea. I mean, he talked about those things a lot, you know, and these ideas.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
His best talks, in my opinion, were when they drew from his vast knowledge of history and esotericism and alchemy and Jungian psychology and all that. And some of those talks are just...
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
mind-boggling you know and they do not really have to invoke this this delusion I mean this is a thing it's like I had this experience I had this serious break from reality eventually I recovered and sometimes you could say Terence didn't recover you know he will remain invested in this illusion delusion rather and That began at La Charrera, and it really persisted throughout most of his life.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And he couldn't let it go, you know. And at a certain point, he reached a point where I know later in life he had doubts. A lot of doubts. And there were other people who came along who were mathematicians, who were better. They actually understood the time way better than he did. And they came forth. And he...
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
I think later in life he began to feel that, you know, the idea wasn't valid, you know, and it really disturbed him. It really dismayed him because by this time it was his career, you know, and I can understand, you know, why he would not want to let it go. But sometimes you have to let things go, you know.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And then, of course, at the same time, you know, so I know that the years before the end of his life were very difficult. You know, he was depressed in a lot of ways. And, you know, people who...
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
i mean terence was like this huge iconic public figure you know but he was also a person he had a family he had you know a difficult marriage he had you know personal things the kind of thing that we all have to deal with because we're human whether we like it or not and we have to deal with those things and i think that uh
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
So he was able to get DMT, and through that connection, Terrence was able to access DMT.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
his public persona and meeting the expectations of his fan base became, you know, difficult for him. Very, almost like he wanted to retreat from it all, you know, in a certain way, through self-doubt, you know. And I used to tell him, Well, later in life, you know, although we had been so close during all this period, we sort of drifted apart.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
But then when he got sick again, I was there for him very much. And I was sort of, I would say, you know, you don't have to...
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
believe in this you don't have to do you don't have to be anything other than just be yourself you know because you are a remarkable person and you don't have to meet other people's expectations you know but he always sort of he was reluctant to give that up and I guess anyone would be and
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
In some sense, I'm always, I'm sort of glad that I never, you know, I sort of didn't like, didn't go for this high public visibility thing. Especially after, you know, I mean, I went back to school and I just said, okay, I'm going to do science, damn it. And I'm going to be an ethnobotanist. I'm going to pursue that. That's what I want to do. And I don't have to be a super famous person.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And so I did that. And I kind of deliberately stayed in the background. And I pursued these other pathways, you know, which I continue to pursue. And I don't have to... I don't have to tie myself or my ideas to a concept that basically you can't prove. So I just said, okay, not that I don't, I mean, it's complicated to talk about, Danny. It's not that I dismiss what went on.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Good question. Nobody knows. But a lot of the people at the Stanford Research Institute were interested in psychedelics. They were doing some wacky stuff. And you know, in the 60s, the whole government program with MKUltra and all that was all in full swing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
In some ways, I was 20 when we went to La Charrera. Terrence was 24. Most of our lives have been lived in the shadow of the events that happened at that time, you know. But I'm 74 now. So a lot of years have gone by since then. And I've lived a life and I've made a career such that it is. And I've, you know, made contributions to the field of ethnobotany. Yeah. You know, mostly that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
I mean, some neuroscience, but that was kind of a detour when I did my postdocs. But always with... mean psychedelics have been the continuing carrot for me and terence for all of our lives i mean that's what got us fascinated and we each pursued it in our own way you know and i continue to pursue it but i'm uh you know i'm i'm uh You know, it's not my obsession. I'm not fanatical about it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
I just think they're very valuable. You know, people say, for example, one of the, you know, so you did all these things. You didn't disrupt the space-time continuum. You didn't do any of this. None of this stuff happened. What happened? What was important about that? I'll tell you what was important as I view it. We brought back the spores of the mushrooms from La Charrera.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And we played around with those for a couple of years, trying to figure out how to grow them. Finally, almost by accident, I figured out how to grow them. You know, and the initial very simple technique, growing these things out of mason jars and all that. Very simple.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
I basically tried – there was a mycologist who worked for the USDA who published this paper in Mycologia, how you could grow small amounts of agaricus bisporus on sterilized substrates in mason jars for genetic research and that sort of thing. And I had the spores. I had the mycelium and I decided, well, give it a shot. Let's see if it works. And what do you know? It worked very well.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
So suddenly mushrooms were back in our lives again. We had access to mushrooms and we were very happy about that. And we decided to publish this book, Psilocybin Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide. which is still available, and we published it, and it got a lot of notice. And now, of course, there are lots of simpler, better ways to grow mushrooms.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
But it was a simple technique that almost anybody could do. And we published this book and it got a lot of notice. So people say, what was the real impact of our trip to La Charrera? That was the impact. This had a tangible effect on society because it brought mushrooms basically within the reach of anyone.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Anyone with a bit of patience and a spare room could grow lots of mushrooms if they wanted to. And we did. And those mushrooms got out there. The book got out there. So that was – that had a social impact. Nothing supernatural about it. or anything. We sort of stumbled on this method and we shared that method.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And that's had a big impact because at that period, you know, psychedelics were not popular. Psychedelics were, you know, very much oppressed by the government and a lot of people were scared. People that were really interested had a way to, as Terrence sometimes, as he once said, just a simple way to get great dope out of mason jars. And people did. And it kept them sort of alive and alive.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
and people's attention so then later when clinicians and people like that decided that they're wanted to you know start working with psychedelics mushrooms were obviously the one to the one to to use because because in some ways mushrooms are the ideal psychedelic right more than lsd or mescaline or some of these things more than dmt more than dmt why is that
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Nobody understood psychedelics.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Again, because the EMT only lasts 20 minutes.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
If you do it with ayahuasca, it lasts six hours or so. But ayahuasca is a botanical formulation.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
It's complex and all that. Right. But psilocybin, you can synthesize it. And of course, clinical trials, the FDA likes, they want to work with pure compounds. They're very biased toward pure compounds. You can work with natural drugs, but generally...
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
If you're like an investigator, like Roland Giffords, for example, at Johns Hopkins, people that started doing clinical studies, they expect you to do it with pure compounds. Psilocybin is easy to make if you're a good chemist. Albert Hoffman synthesized it in 1958. And so it sort of kept it on the radar.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And then when people were looking at it from a therapeutic point of view, psilocybin seemed a natural choice. And it has a lot of things that recommend it because it lasts about the right amount of time. It's six or seven hours. Like LSD is 12 to 18 hours depending on Mescaline is you have to take higher doses, and it lasts a long time. So it lasts about the same time. It's very non-toxic.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Yeah, that's right. And at the time, psychedelics were just this thing that, you know, the government felt that they needed to know about. So there were secret ops programs at the Stanford Research Institute.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
It's totally compatible with human metabolism. And it's a kick-ass psychedelic. I mean, depending on the dose, it can be toxic. a fairly mild experience, but still very interesting, or in a higher experience, it can be, you know, complete with visions and all that, and it can really be, you know, it can really be therapeutic, you know.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Like, Wade Davis often says, a story he tells, he said, well, you know, our parents Back in the 60s, they would say, you must never take these things because if you do, you'll never be the same again. That's the fucking point.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Yes, yes. The answer is the data is coming out that, in fact, there are long-term changes in the brain in a beneficial way. So there are short-term changes. There's the trip that you have, you know. And the trip that you have... The therapeutic sort of mechanism behind the benefits of psychedelics, whether psilocybin or LSD or whatever, you've heard of this concept of the default mode network?
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Mm-mm. That's a neuroscience term. The default mode network is basically the neural mechanisms that feedback, internal neural feedback mechanisms that maintain what we call ordinary consciousness effectively. Our focus on space and time, our sense of self and being localized. Ordinary consciousness. That's the default mode network.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Most of the time, the default mode network is where you want to be, you know, because you want to be functional. You want to be able to drive a car and get up and go to work, pay the mortgage, do these things, you know, ordinary functioning. But it can also be a trap and particularly for people with like intractable depression and that sort of thing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Their default mode network in some ways is dysfunctional and they don't, you know, they're in these feedback loops that are harmful, that are not supporting their mental health. So what the psychedelics do is they temporarily disable that default mode network. They effectively let you step out of your reference frame.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
It lets you look at your situation from a different perspective. You've stepped out of your reference frame. So if you look at your – Your depression or your trauma, your addiction or various problems that you're facing, you could look at that in a different way. And in that way, you can sort of defuse it. You can sort of overcome that and you can resolve a lot of those things.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
So that's the immediate solution. you know therapeutic benefit of something like psilocybin and it may one session may do it or it may take two or three but basically it will resolve it however what they now know is there are persistent changes that last longer than that long after the trip is is over and What we're seeing is – and by we, I mean neuroscientists, not me.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Yeah, yeah. One of Terence's other good friends, a friend of this fellow Rick Watson, the chemist, another good friend of his was a guy named John Parker, and he was another, you know, amazing person. And he was the son of a big mucky muck at the NASA Ames Research Center, which was in Mountain View next to Palo Alto, next to Los Altos. And John Parker Sr.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
So, you know, this is all in the literature. What's happening is there is a change in connectivity of the synapses. in the brain, sort of a re-change that reflects these changes that you're having in the therapeutic state. Connectivity and also the two words are synaptogenesis, forming of connections between neurons. and neurogenesis, which is growth actually of new neurons.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Psilocybin and other psychedelics initiate these processes. So yes, it rewires your brain in ways that are beneficial largely.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
That's exactly right. It changes your perspective on things. And this can be very, very helpful and very therapeutic, particularly if you're trying – If you're dealing with something like intractable depression, I mean, so-called major depressive disorder, which is a clinically defined state, is what psilocybin was initially approved for in clinical studies.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
But now that it's getting approved, it's applied to all these other things. For example, smoking cessation. There are studies with smoking cessation with psilocybin.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
lifetime serious cigarette addicts three pack a day people over decades you know the treatment with psilocybin over you know three or four treatments with the proper integration preparation all that three or four treatments uh 80 percent of those people stopped smoking just stopped just And you know why?
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
I think, I mean, being experienced myself with psilocybin and also a former smoker, psilocybin didn't make me stop smoking. Various other things did. But I think what people, you know, if they come into it with a real sincere desire to stop smoking, you know, they have this experience. And they look at what they're doing to their body and how they're poisoning themselves.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And it's like their reaction is repulsion or revulsion. And it's like they're able to stop. And no other treatment for smoking cessation even comes close. 80% of the sample, these were lifelong smokers.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
This is all done at Johns Hopkins. This is Matt Johnson's work, basically, one of Roland Griffith's protégés at the time. So that's an example of these things. But the thing is, you do not have to be sick to benefit from psychedelics. It's approved.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
for therapeutic uses but Things like PTSD and addiction and so on but It can be used to benefit well people as well because it does it improves Your outlook it improves the way that you think in fact One of my colleagues, I was going to recommend that you bring him on the podcast, a good friend of mine and Terrence, a guy named Bruce Dahmer.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
D-A-M-E-R.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
He – so he's an exobiologist. He's – an engineer and a biochemist, and he studies, exobiology is the study of extraterrestrial life. Well, there is no extraterrestrial life that we have to study right now. So what we have, what he studies is the origin of life. And he and his colleagues have developed some very groundbreaking theories about the origin of life.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And you can look him up, you can look up his website and all that. But what's interesting is that psychedelics has been very useful to him as a creative tool, effectively as a scientific tool. A tool for thinking about nature. and new processes.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
He's even founded an organization called minds.org, which is he and some colleagues are developing structured protocols to use psychedelics to apply to scientific problems. Because again, it's this ability to step out of your usual reference frame. You can look at your own problems. You can also look at nature. And you can see things about processes, about natural processes that you miss.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
was the head of chemical operations at NASA Ames Research Center. So he was doing a lot of research on material science. He was looking into materials to make spacecraft out of that were fire-resistant and all that. But because he was a very, very peculiar person, shall we put it that way, he had side interests, and side interests included psychedelics.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
One of the things I often say about psychedelics, they bring the background forward.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
That's the default mode network. The default mode network is defined by what it excludes from your awareness, right? Because it makes sure that your attention is focused on the immediate things you need to survive. If you're on the freeway at...
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
you know 90 miles an hour you really don't want elves materializing out of the you know you don't need that that's not yeah but if but if if you let if in a controlled state and this is why that the concept of set and setting is so important in the proper set and setting you're in a situation where you could let that default mode network dissolve and and then
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
All the things that it's filtering out can come in and you can experience them in a non-threatening situation. And you can experience this background, which is always there, but we're genetically and evolutionarily programmed to exclude those things. Especially in the West. An indigenous person has much less of this.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
If you go into a forest with an indigenous person who lives in nature, that person is likely to notice processes.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
that are always going on but you don't see them you don't see them until they're pointed out right because you're programmed not to see them like what kind of processes are you talking about just anything you might look at you know the way the way an anthill works you know the way the sunlight the sun lands on a leaf the way you know the way ecosystems work and all of this you can sort of
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Psychedelics can be a lens. Effectively, it's like a scientific instrument. You can train that. You can look at phenomena, maybe things that you've looked at before that you feel that you understand very well. But when you look at them from the psychedelic perspective, you notice things that you never noticed before. Right. And this has been proven.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
I mean, there are people who have won Nobel Prizes based on this. Cary Mullis, for example, is famous for, you know, he discovered the PCR. And he's quite out front. He was like LSD, you know. gave me the tools to understand this process that gave me the ability to, as he put it, get down among the molecules and see what was going on.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And so Bruce Dahmer and his colleagues are effectively, they're trying to develop, you know, structured protocols to use psychedelics for this kind of thing, for problems in physics, chemistry, mathematics, and so on. All these people are obviously far-gone nerds, but very, very smart people. And Bruce is just an amazing, amazing person. He's given talks at our ESPD conferences, the last one.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
ESPD is something the McKenna Academy did, the Ethnopharmacologic Search Program. for psychoactive drugs was one of two conferences that we did and the espd 55 was in uh 2022 if people go to the website they can see that you can listen to bruce's talk and all the other talks too you might want to put draw that that conference to people's attention and uh
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
just just he's an incredibly brilliant mind you know and all the people that he's working with and he also another interesting thing about Bruce is he he he is one of these people that uh You know, he's one of these people that naturally can get into this psychedelic place. He talks about endowaska.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
John Parker studied everything esoteric that he could get his hands on – alchemy, chemistry, esoteric traditions, all of these things. He became a very good friend of Terrence's and then he came back to Paonia, this little podunk town that I was stuck in going to high school. But one summer, John Parker came back with Terrence to Paonia. And he took a liking to me for some reason.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
You know, he seems to be someone that's able to induce psychedelic experiences based on his own neurochemistry. You know. There are people like this. And he told me, he told me, that's why I never took psychedelics for so long, because I didn't really want to disrupt this. You know, I told him, forget it, Bruce, take psychedelics.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
That's right. That's right. You can do that. And this is where nobody wants to have terrifying experiences, but sometimes it does. This is where set and setting comes in, especially with these strong psychedelics. You have to pay attention to set and setting. I assume that a lot of your terrifying experiences were on cannabis, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Cannabis can be very much like a psychedelic at high doses, you know. But set and setting are the key variables. Leary and Mechner and all these people were right back in the 60s. They were talking about it. So setting obviously is – Setting is where you do it. I mean, you want to do it in a place that you feel comfortable, that you feel safe.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Those are the main things that, whether outside or inside or whatever, that's less important as long as you feel like you're in a safe environment. Because you're deliberately putting yourself in a situation where you have to let all your defenses down, dissolve this default mode network. Let it dissolve. That could be very frightening, and a lot of people have a hard time.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
But so put yourself in a place where you could just say, whatever happens, I'm not going to die. I'm safe. These drugs are not going to kill me. It's okay. Set is much more complicated. People say – sometimes people say, well, set is your intention or what you want out of the trip and so on. Well, it is partly that. But set, to my mind, is you. Set is everything you bring to it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Your whole life, whatever you've learned, whatever you know, all of those things, that's the set, right, that you bring to it, that's interacting in this setting that you very deliberately structured, you know. And then the other two variables here, which are rarely mentioned, but obviously maybe there should be more.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
The other two variables, set and setting, but then what is the medicine and what is the dose? Because those things are going to influence it too. And this is what shamanism is useful for. I mean, in ayahuasca, for example, it's almost always taken in a group.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
and there's a curandero or a shaman or whatever you want to call that person, they are the person that are structuring this sentence setting, structuring the setting basically through songs, through blowing smoke, through maybe other types of audio things, you know, other types of things. But basically they are –
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
controlling the set the setting so that people can relax into it and they're and shamans you know if they're good i hate the word shaman because it's it's a siberian word and the and the curanderos are not shaman curadero is probably a better word or ayahuasca but but these people uh men and women if they're experienced They know how to do this.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And they – in this state, they get very tuned in to everyone in the group, almost telepathically. I mean they can tell if you're having a hard time. They can tell – Come over, blow a little mapacho smoke on you, maybe sing a song in front of you, maybe get you calmed down or get you redirect what you're doing. That's their job. That's what shamans do.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
So this idea of taking high amounts of these things – It's good to have somebody like that or have a therapist. Therapists can do it. I think psychotherapy, like psychedelic psychotherapy is evolving more toward what shamans do. you know, integrating some of those methodologies.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
He thought I was cool. And I was totally in awe of this guy because he was so weird and yet so obviously brilliant and he knew so many things. So he became a major mentor of mine. And we entered into this correspondence that lasted years in which he introduced me to all of these amazing ideas. And it's really – that was I guess a major influence in my sort of esoteric education.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
There you go.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Yeah, this is all right. This is good. I mean, I think it's good. I think it's good to have, you know, what we used to call a sitter. And sometimes a sitter is enough. A sitter may not be a shaman, but maybe just a trusted friend.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Not even necessarily in the same room. But, you know, if you get upset, hey. having a hard time, come in and pat my knee or whatever, you know. And because, you know, you're putting yourself in a unusual state that can be terrifying. But as you point out, there's always something to be learned, you know. I mean, even the terrifying experiences are, sometimes they're the most valuable experiences.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Well, I think it's changing, though, particularly with psychedelics. I mean, psychedelics, there's a lot of research has accumulated now to show that they do have these benefits that if properly used, they can be used. They're not harmful and they can be effective. very helpful.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
So it's kind of shifted the conversation from what it used to be even, well, this has all been happening since basically since Roland Griffith started working with psilocybin and getting FDA approval and, you know, playing it straight in terms of he was a, you know, serious neuroscientist and so on. But now their benefits are being recognized. But here's the thing. Any
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
I look at psychedelics, they're basically a technology. Any technology can be misused, you know, and any technology will be misused. You can be sure of it, you know, a lot of times. There are whole issues about people, you know, shamans or self-styled shamans that use that to dominate people, you know, sexual abuse, all of this stuff.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Not that this doesn't happen in therapeutic, so-called therapeutic situations.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
in anything. The problem that I think in the conversation about drugs has always been the drugs are identified as the demons. Drugs are just drugs. They just have the properties that they have. The moral quality of how you use them comes from us. And that's true of any technology. The choices we make
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
in terms of how to use the technology, be it drugs or atomic weaponry or anything, it comes down to us. We're the moral compass, not the technology's neutral.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
No, you don't necessarily go back to the well and drink again. They do not have this reinforcing effect, and that's exactly right. These other drugs work through the dopaminergic pathway, and they reinforce you. You do it, and you want to do it again, and you want to do it again, and it's very, very hard to throw that off.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Yeah, we will talk about that in that sense. Cocaine is definitely one of those. And psychedelics can be useful, again, by letting you step out of your reference frame and look at this addiction process. Maybe it's alcohol. Maybe it's cocaine. Maybe it's heroin. Maybe it's tobacco. All of these things work together. Directly or indirectly through this dopaminergic pathway.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
So does sex for that matter. Sex involves anything that really sort of pushes the pleasure button. Naturally, you want to repeat it. But there's a point at which it becomes unhealthy. It becomes an obsession. And so looking at it through the perspective of psychedelics can help you get a handle on that. It helps you step away from it. It helps you defuse it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And that's the therapeutic power when it comes to addiction. It's all about this default mode network. And people, you know, this default mode network, like we said, it's very useful. It's where you want to be most of the time. I don't like the term default mode network. I call it the reality hallucination. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And of course he knew a lot about drugs. I mean we all were wanting to learn about drugs. So DMT was there. LSD was around.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
the reality our brain synthesizes a model of reality you've talked about simulations yes you know and this this guy with the dmt and the simulations yes i'm here to tell you we are all in a simulation everybody's in a simulation our brains simulate a model of reality you know we live in that model of reality we don't know what reality itself is because we're in this model of reality
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And it's defined largely by what doesn't get through.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
It's exactly the brain filter hypothesis. The information comes to us through our sensory neural interfaces. Kind of gets all mixed together inside, you know, and extrudes a model of reality, which is what we experience as ordinary consciousness. And then you can introduce another pharmacology or something else into it, a drug, meditation, another practice. You can change that model of reality.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
But you're always trapped in that model of reality. We can't even say that much about what's outside that model because –
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
you take psychedelics and you realize the concept of inside and outside don't make sense you know you're not really separated yeah you know you know we are all one right that is the uh that's the the psychedelic cliche but it's true you know we're not separated this is like young's idea of the archipelago of consciousness exactly exactly
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Right. We appear to be separate. And I'm a serious Jungian, and so is Terence. Jung was a deep influence, and I think that's exactly what's going on. So this reality hallucination... You know, we can be grateful that we have it because it makes us functional, but it could also go off track. I mean, it could be dysfunctional.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
We – the way that you – usually what you got was very impure DMT. It was probably made in a bathtub somewhere by some crazy chemist. It was anything but pure. It didn't really matter because it's a free base. You put a little bit of it in a pipe on top of an organic substrate like maybe parsley leaves or something like that or cannabis. And then you just smoked it in a pipe.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And when it does get disrupted, it's a problem. But then we come along and we say, well, you can say, well, my reality hallucination is turning into a bummer. It's not fun anymore. And then you can take a psychedelic and you can disrupt it. You can reprogram it. And you don't have to worry because the brain and physiological systems in general, they'll tend toward equilibrium.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
It's going to fall back together. It's going to fall back together in most cases. I mean, some people don't, but very rarely do people not recover from psychedelics. And even if there's a prolonged- What do you mean recover?
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Get back to ordinary reality. Oh, there's people that stay there? Yeah. It's been known, yes. Oh, my God. What do they do? Well, they end up in, you know, they end up in mental hospitals, you know, talking to entities that aren't there. This is one of my biggest fears. That's everybody's biggest fear, man. Is it? But it's – well, often, but it's –
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
It's very rare, for one thing, even if you have these prolonged states, like my La Torreira experience. I was as dissociated from reality as anybody could possibly be. If I was still in that place, people would just say, oh, poor Dennis, he just never made it back.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
I was scared about it. Right, right. But it did come back. And the interesting thing, yeah, hallucinogen-persisting perception disorder.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
That's one of the symptoms of this.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Right, and you don't have the neural mechanisms to reintegrate. Interesting that you mentioned that. You should put the McKenna Academy website back up because we are having a seminar. We're having a virtual seminar in April on this very topic. It's called, can you go back, go to programs? So this is a virtual seminar that we're doing in April. Okay.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And this is talking about this, you know, psychedelics and psychosis and spiritual emergencies. If you scroll down, you can see the people doing it. And it's going to be a very interesting one-day virtual conference. One of our board members said, Dr. Ranjit Varghese, who is a psychiatrist. He has a ketamine clinic, but he's one of our board members.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
He's going to talk, and then these other people are going to talk, including Dr. a couple of curanderos. And all of this was sort of triggered by Lee Kaiser there on the right. Lee's a good friend of mine, and he's done a lot of medicine work with ayahuasca in the Sacred Valley. He's been into it for years. And he has had several of these psychotic interactions as a result of ayahuasca.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
three or four big hits. It's very hard on the lungs, you know, but we were smoking cannabis to where our lungs were, you know, endured to that anyway. That's how we did it, you know? And when you do it that way, vaping, is sometimes it's a lot more gentle than taking DMT by a pipe because it is so fast it just comes at you like a freight train.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Psychotic, what do you mean? You're talking about like the- Psychotic, so we just say prolonged dissociations from reality, whatever they are. Psychosis is such a hard word. But shall we say, he's had a couple of these, and so a lot of it, he's gonna share his experience. Oh, wow. And the indigenous people, Enrique and Loivre,
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
were involved in helping him get straightened out, get back to reality using their traditional techniques. And they were far more effective than psychiatrists.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
That's possible. That's rather surprising, but it's possible because cocaine is going to focus you. I wouldn't reach for cocaine as necessarily the antidote to psychedelics, but maybe it brought him back to a point where he could sort of come out of that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
That's right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
That's exactly it. Yes, you touched on a point that I often make. We're made of drugs. That's the thing. We are biochemical engines that work on drugs. Neurotransmitters, enzymes, hormones, all of this, we're biochemical engines. Maybe more than that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
I'd like to think that there's a spiritual aspect, but the functioning body is a biochemical machine that runs on drugs, and this is why drugs have their effect. DMT, for example, we know that it occurs in the brain at rather high levels.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
It's actually a neurotransmitter. And there's, you know, recent work has shown, originally it was sort of the focus was all about the pineal gland. And that data is not so valid anymore. The pineal gland does make DMT, but not enough to have an effect. But there are whole new neurotransmitter systems that have been developed
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
identified for which DMT is basically the neurotransmitter at levels comparable to serotonin. DMT is in pretty much everything, right? In fact, DMT is in everything. It's true. And you know why it's in everything? It's because DMT is the simplest molecularly, the simplest psychedelic, and it comes from tryptophan. Tryptophan is an amino acid, one of the 20 that makes up proteins, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
So tryptophan is in every living thing, every living thing, because it's one of the 20. And there are enzymes— DMT is two steps from tryptophan. There are enzymes that take off the carboxyl group. Tryptophan is an amino acid. decarboxylases, this class of enzymes called decarboxylases, remove the acid group, and then you get amines.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
So you get tryptophan, you remove the carboxyl group, you get tryptamine. You stick two methyl groups on that, another enzyme comes along called N-methyltransferase, I love biochemistry because the name of enzymes describe what they do, right? And methyltransferase, it sticks methyl groups on things, CH3 groups on things. So two steps from tryptophan, you get DMT.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
It's like, you know, this just – the world dissolves in this world of hallucinations and – And apparently strange entities and all these things just opens up. But it's the same thing. It's a 20-minute outside, very, very short experience. Yeah. And we were totally impressed with this. I mean, who wouldn't be? And we were fascinated.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And then from that, you get all these variations, bufotenine, fibethoxy DMT, psilocybin. You get this whole tryptamine family of most of which are psychoactive. But DMT is the primary hallucinogenic or psychedelic tryptamine, and it's the simplest one. It's not orally active. And actually, you could eat plants that contain DMT and people do. It's the part of some people's diet.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
But because they're not taking MAO inhibitors, they never suspect they're taking a hallucinogen. For example, DMT occurs in oranges. And lemons and things like that at low levels, you know, but it's there. DMT, I think there are thousands of plants that contain DMT. It's not rare at all. Not all plants express DMT in great quantities, but it's there.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And then some do actually produce significant amounts of it, like acacias, for example. Acacia, which is primarily – I mean acacia is about 1,200 genera or 1,200 species all through Africa, mostly Australia concentrated. Some of the most potent sources of DMT and other tryptamines are found in acacias, which ironically happens to be – they're known as – generically they're known as wattles.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
In Australia, the wattle is the national tree of Australia. There's no record that Aborigines use these things, but they have been there. My theory is that there's probably trace amounts of DMT in all plants because of these enzymes. Decarboxylases and methyltransferases are pretty much involved in cellular processes at all levels. Nobody's going to do this and nobody's going to fund it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
But I'll bet if you went out and just started picking plants at random and analyzing them for DMT, you would find trace amounts of DMT and in some cases large amounts. And those are the ones that have become utilized like the chacruna.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
psychotria, which is the admixture plant for ayahuasca, or these anagenanthra snuffs that are the seeds are made into stuff, or the ukuhe that we were talking about, the varolas. They contain large amounts of DMT. And indigenous people have, you know, they're very clever.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
They want to get high just like everybody does, but they become very clever at identifying these plants and learning how to prepare them.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Yeah. Well, this goes back to the whole stoned ape theory. Yes. That's another rabbit hole we could go down.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Oh, yeah. Yeah. And it may – it's another one of these theories. It's – yeah, it's circumstantial evidence, but it's probably true. Terrence actually didn't come up with it. It was my idea. Oh, it was your idea. But, you know, we shared ideas. I mean, he wrote the book, Food of the Gods. And he, you know, it's a great book if you haven't read it. It's definitely worth reading.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And it is this idea about, but I have elaborated on that idea. And what's interesting about, He suggests that mushrooms were used quite by ancient civilizations.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
We thought LSD is interesting, but DMT is the ultimate metaphysical reality pill, we thought. Although it's not a pill, but Terrence used to call it that. It's the ultimate metaphysical reality. The problem we experienced with DMT was it was too darn short. By the time you got into it,
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And my theory is that mushrooms were probably the oldest psychedelic that humans have ever used and may have been used as long ago as two million years and may have had a lot to do with the evolution of our neural structures and our consciousness. don't look at me like that. This is not such a crazy idea. There's inferential evidence for this.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
So we know that hominid populations evolved in Africa around 2 million years ago. And although the fossil record is, you know, incomplete, obviously, but we have a pretty good idea of the lineage, you know. There are fossils of starting with the first True hominids, Homo habilis, was probably the first hominid. And then there were different lineages that appeared. Homo erectus was part of this.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
There wasn't a single lineage. There was actually various species in this environment that were interacting and interbreeding with each other. And eventually some emerged as the dominant species. Homo habilis, Homo erectus, eventually Homo sapiens, and over about 2 million years, the size and complexity of the human brain expanded, basically tripled inside Homo habilis
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
The brain of Homo habilis was small by comparison, about 500 cubic centimeters. Homo erectus, somewhat larger, maybe 1,000 cubic centimeters. There you go. Oh, yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Yeah, that could be. I've got another chart. He's an anthropologist. Yeah, this is a good one. So Homo sapiens has the largest brain. Actually, Homo neanderthals have a slightly bigger brain. Right. But they're also much bigger people than Homo sapiens. So brain-to-body mass, that's about 1,500 centimeters. And so the fossil evidence is there.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
What's also there is that in this environment, there's fossil evidence that there were cattle. These have been found. These people were living with cattle. They were hunting cattle. They were probably eating cattle. If you got cattle, you've got mushrooms. Would it have to be cattle? Could it be any other sort of megafauna? It could have been. It could have been. I mean, yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
It doesn't have to be cow shit that mushroom grows on. But we do know from fossil evidence that the ancestors of the modern cow was in this environment at that time. And we know from paleoclimatology that it was a wet environment. The Sahara is a desert now. But at that time, from paleoclimatological data, we know that it was a wet environment. There were seasonal rains at least.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
it was over, you know, by the time you got into it and sort of started looking around, you were already on the way down. So we thought, well, maybe if we could find an orally active form of some kind, it would be more prolonged and we'd have more time to look into that dimension, which is what we thought of it as. We thought of it as a place, not an experience, but an actual
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
It was lake country. It was savanna. So there was megafauna of all sorts. It was a humid, wet environment. There had to be mushrooms there. There just had to be mushrooms there because psilocybe comensis. If you go to any similar tropical environment these days, wet with Cebu cattle or similar cows, you're going to find these mushrooms. I mean, they're just there. They follow the cows.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And so in this, and these mushrooms in the environment, they're not difficult to spot. I mean, they're big. They're robust. So if you're a hungry hominid, Looking for something to eat. Sooner or later – sooner rather than later, you're going to sample these. And then who knows what that effect would be. But then that's where these long-term effects of psilocybin on the neural reorganization –
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
can begin to kick in, right? But what propagates that over evolutionary time? Well, this process which is known as Epigenetics.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Epigenetics is a mechanism where effectively for acquired characteristics being propagated over generations. And trauma as well, right? Trauma, yes. All these kinds of things. Drug, other kinds of drugs, other kind of not so good drugs will also propagate. So Lamarckianism used to be...
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
was a theory of evolution that was kind of debunked, you know, that was like, well, giraffes have long necks because they're always straining to get the leaves at the top of trees, right? So eventually they got long necked. There was something too that it didn't, eventually they got long necked. So there wasn't maybe an environmental influence, a selection. The tallest giraffes got the leaves.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
That's how natural selection works. But this happens on a more biochemical level and it has to do with the unwrapping of segments of DNA that are bound up in these bodies called histones in the chromosomes. And under the effect of environmental influences, these inaccessible segments of DNA can be unbound and expressed.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And if the neural changes are related to that, the activation of these segments of DNA, then that could actually be propagated across generations. Wow. So that's a plausible mechanism for the stone ape theory. It's not so crazy. It's like, of course.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
What else can you think of that would lead to this complexification of the brain other than the fact that hominids in this environment were extremely important? We're exposed to all sorts of environmental pressures, but I don't think learning to throw spears better was necessarily enough. But this was something that was part of their diet, and it could have this effect over evolutionary time.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
I mean, it makes perfect sense. It's one of these theories. It's a plausible theory. How do you prove it?
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
There's no way to disprove it that I could see. Maybe if we had one of those time machines that this guy is going to invent for us, I would love that. I told you I was totally obsessed with time travel. I'd go back immediately to the Serengeti plane a couple of years ago and see what the hell was going on.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
place that our minds were teleported to or something like that. We thought if we could find another form that was orally active, it would absorb most slowly and go away more slowly. So that's what led us to look for an orally active form of DMT in South America. This was all around 1968, 1969. Okay. And we didn't know about ayahuasca.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Yes, we were very similar. Of course, my brother was four years older than I was, and he was interested in all kinds of things. And being the older sibling, he got all the attention, right? And I was sort of in the background. But he was such an interesting person. I wanted to be involved in everything that he was doing. And I'm just the pesky little brother, sort of tagging along.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Right. So – Neotony, it's called also.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Ayahuasca is an orally active form of DMT, but no one understood that pharmacology at that time. What we did find was a paper by Schultes, the famous ethnobotanist from Harvard that was major influence on all of these psychedelically inclined ethnobotanists. A paper in his own house publication called the Harvard Botanical Museum Leaflets.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Likely. I mean it's a good – general body structure. It's useful for things, but you can imagine many other body structures that might work. Well, this is a fascinating idea, because if my inference is correct, so these are future aliens that are coming back to get DNA. The implication is that at some point there is a cataclysm. That wipes us out.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
But they've already got the DNA, so then they could come back and repopulate the Earth. Yeah, they could go back and repopulate the future. I feel so much better already.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
After listening to this podcast that you did about time travel, the gentleman's name was… Ronald Mallett. After I listened to that, I thought, this is… Actually, the most plausible explanation – I can almost buy this because he made it clear how, you know, what we understand of physics, it is actually possible if you have the command of these incredible sources of energy and all that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
it is actually possible to travel into the past. This does not violate what we understand about time. I always assume that, of course, future time travel is... No problem. Give it. The faster you go, time slows down and decades can— But getting to the past, that's the tricky part. And he talked about a plausible way that this could happen. I need one of those machines, actually.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. These are mind-boggling concepts. Yeah. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Kind of comes next. Yeah, I'm familiar with all that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And he published many, many things on South American psychedelics. He was the pioneer in those days. They called them hallucinogens. But he published a paper in that journal called Verola as an Orally Active Hallucinogen. That was the title. And we stumbled on this paper and we thought – This is it, man. This is what we're looking for. It was this Watoto drug that they use.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Right, right. And really, there isn't. I mean, many of these drugs were psychoactive. Very interesting that you should mention Galen, because Galen was… one of the first more or less modern pharmacologists. In some ways, he was a phytochemist, and he was a pharmacologist, and he was mucking around with all these formulations, combinations of drugs and extractions and, you know, preparations.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
This very interesting… That you bring this up, because this actually segues very smoothly into the topic that I am going to talk about at this COCA conference that we're organizing. I've been thinking, you know, what am I going to talk about?
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And I'm not an expert on coca or cocaine or any of that other than, you know, I'm certainly not like some of the people that have spent their whole lives talking about it. So I've been wondering, what am I going to talk about? And what I'm going to talk about at the COCA conference is – and this is just still being formulated in my mind.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
I'm going to talk about how – I'm going to talk about the reemergence – of spirit into medicine, right? Back in the day when Galen and Paracelsus and all these people, Paracelsus was another amazing figure, very modern ideas about pharmacology and drugs. He was the one that articulated the idea that dose was important. He said there's There is no drug that is not a poison.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
It's the dose that makes the difference. So all these people were making extracts and doing different things, and they were pulling extracts out and that sort of thing. In fact, early distillation technology – of fermented fruits and that sort of thing. You could ferment fruits and get wine and beers. But then there were people trying to concentrate those using primitive distillation techniques.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And their understanding of these medicines, it was not about chemistry. It was that they were infused with a certain spiritual essence, in fact, an intelligence, in fact, spirits. And the word spirits, we talked about distilled spirits. That goes back to an age when they were actually trying to take the spirit out of the plant and concentrate it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
That's what the concept was, distilled spirits, right? So there was – people have always mucked around with plants and tried different combinations and so on. And you can look at this at the history of – the more recent history of ayahuasca if you look at some of our ESPD talks.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Yeah, they took all kinds of places, and these venoms are now being recognized as a tiny amount. They're therapeutic. So they were doing this, and there was alchemy, and there was all this herbalism, and the plants were understood to be…
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
effectively intelligent entities that people were in partner with they had spirit they were you know the idea of a life force you know and but then there was a important
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
I don't know if we call it a milestone, but at the beginning of the 19th century, there was a German pharmacist named Sertner who isolated morphine from the opium poppy for the first time, morphine in a pure form, isolated morphine. And morphine had most of the properties of opium. It was an analgesic. You could get addicted on it. It caused euphoria and so on.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Varroa is a genus of trees in the nutmeg family. And in many tribes in the Amazon, they make snuff out of it, the sap of Varroa. is loaded with DMT and 5-methoxy-DMT and related tryptamines. And various tribes, they extract the sap and they powder it and they mix it with ashes and they make a snuff out of it. So effectively, it's DMT. And it's short-acting.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
But it was clearly not alive, right? It was not a spirit. It was a crystal, you know. And so that led to, in some ways, that was the first step. It was an alkaloid, right, like so many of these medicines are. And because it's an alkaloid, it could be easily isolated in a pure form, you know, using techniques we think of as pretty primitive chemistry. But you could isolate it and crystallize it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And the first time that was done, it was done with morphine. And it had all the properties. So it was the beginning of this shift in understanding. During the 19th century, in my lectures I sometimes say the 19th century was the age of alkaloids. It was the first beginning of modern phytotherapy, pharmacotherapy, based on pure compounds.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And a whole slew of alkaloids were isolated in the 19th century. Morphine, scopolamine, hyoscyamine, cocaine around the middle of the 19th century, theobromine, caffeine, all of these alkaloids were isolated.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
culminating with the isolation of mescaline in a pure form at the end of the 19th century in 1903, or maybe it was 1899, I'm not sure, but Arthur Hefter, the chemist Arthur Hefter, for whom the Hefter Research Institute is named, isolated mescaline from peyote. So the concept that
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
always before therapy with plants was understood to be a symbiosis, a symbiotic alliance between these plants that were intelligent entities that had their own agency, obviously had active compounds, but were understood to be in some ways very much participating in this spiritual process of healing that we call medicine or we call herbalism.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
But the isolation of these pure compounds was the beginning of the concept of spirit became ostracized from medicine. And the idea, no, there's no life force. There's no vital force in these things. It's just chemistry. It's just pharmacology. And so are we. We are biochemical engines. Just biochemical machines.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And if you apply the right molecular monkey wrench, you know, in the form of a molecule, you can fix the problem, you know. You can fix the machine. So the idea that spirit was part of medicine, was part of healing, was suppressed as medicine evolved into what it is now, you know. And it very much de-emphasizes that. spirituality. It's very much about pharmacotherapy. We have chemicals.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
You have sicknesses. They affect these different processes. There's no invocation of any spiritual aspect to it. It's all seen as very mechanistic. But then, so it goes on and, you know, as we know, the American Medical Association and these other institutions went out of the way to suppress herbalism and herbalists and to dismiss the whole thing as quackery.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Even though there's a vast body of literature, scientific literature, that shows that herbal preparations do have medicinal properties, but so-called mainstream medicine, pharmaceutical medicine, Biomedicine, as I like to characterize it, they don't accept that. Or they're skeptical, definitely. They don't accept it. For one thing, you can't patent natural products. It's not as easy.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
But this one tribe, the Wetoto, had an orally active preparation. They made, instead of a snuff... They made a powder out of it. And they made a paste. They made a little – they didn't dry it down completely. They made a sticky paste. They rolled that in ashes and then they ate it orally.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
So it's in their interest to suppress this and to sort of – And to say it's all quackery and all these alchemists and witches, you know, witches were often witches were midwives, basically.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And they were people that understood women's health and the use of plants for women's health, for inducing labor, for inducing abortion, which was a big one, for, you know, inducing lactation, for doing all the things that, you know, are peculiar to women's physiology. That body of knowledge was the, you know, was the province of the women. The women have this wisdom. It was women's wisdom.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And so medicine got away from spirit. Medicine exorcised spirit. You know, and said it's all just mechanical. And then so that went on and went on from the 19th century until the 20th century. Yeah. And then along came psychedelics. And, I mean, they've always been there. They've always been used.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
But along came psychedelics as potential medicines and this sort of psychedelic renaissance and the reintroduction of psychedelics into medicine, into medical therapies – The reason medicine is so uncomfortable with psychedelics is that they are medicines for the spirit, effectively. They have to admit that a spirit exists if they're going to use psychedelics.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And this is why, you know, I mean, they're grudgingly beginning to use psychedelics in medicine. But a lot of people are uncomfortable with this for this very reason. In fact, there's a whole group of medicinal chemists and drug developers who are trying to take psychedelic molecules and engineer the trip out of the molecule, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
So they're trying to create non-psychedelic psychedelics, which by definition they can't be because psychedelic means… mind manifesting, right? You have to admit that the mind exists. The mind and the spirit may be the same thing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
So these non-psychedelic psychedelics, the thinking is, well, if you just tweak these receptors and you tweak these changes that the psychedelic produces without ever having
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
and experience it'll be fine you don't have to suffer all that terror all that trauma all that catharsis that you have to go through when you take a psychedelic therapy session you'll never know anything happened you'll just suddenly feel better you know This is bullshit, in my opinion. I think that you cannot dissociate the psychedelic experience from the therapeutic effect.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
I think these people trying to develop non-psychedelic psychedelics are seriously deluded and misguided. And so psychedelics... have come back into medicine and it's changing the perception because in order to develop therapies that are appropriate to use psychedelics, they have to change their models, right? And drug development, drug approval, it's all so far been based on the
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
placebo-controlled double-blind clinical trial. That's the structure, right? And you know how that works. So you have a placebo, you have an active drug. The doctor and the patients don't know who's getting what until the blind is removed. And is there an effect? Or is it just placebo? Is there a real effect? And this is the approach they take to this thing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
When it comes to psychedelics, you cannot really apply that method. You can't develop a placebo controlled. How do you develop a placebo for something like psilocybin?
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
You know. I mean, the joke, the cartoon that you may have seen is, you know, they're in a clinic and, you know, half the people are dancing around and rolling on the floor and there's a couple sitting on the couch and he looks at the woman and he says, I'm guessing we got the placebo. Yeah, right, yes. And this is true.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And, you know, and this is important because... Because if they insist on developing these drugs using these outmoded methodologies based on placebo-controlled clinical trials, they can't do it. MDMA went down in flames for exactly this reason.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
The company that MAPS formed, Lycos, to bring MDMA to the market had like $50 million involved in this, and they did clinical trials with MDMA for trauma, and it was very effective. But there was an FDA review board. Most of the people on the board were not really clinicians. None of them had any experience themselves with any of these psychedelics or any really clinical trials.
Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
And they said, well, It wasn't a well-controlled study because you didn't have the right placebos. You didn't design it correctly. And so we don't accept these results. And as a result, we don't approve MDMA. And the psychiatric community is saying, but wait a minute, this showed profound effectiveness for treating PTSD. You can't just dismiss this.