The Tao of the Wisdom Warrior

[Intro] Welcome to Brainforest Café with Dennis McKenna.

[00:00:18] Dennis McKenna: Tom Pinkson, who goes by Tomás, has been walking the warrior wisdom path for far longer than most of us have been walking.

In his recent book, he shares the wisdom distilled from a lifetime of seeking to understand himself and his place in the realm of shamanic and indigenous practices.

In the course of his long life, he has learned from the great medicine teachers, including LSD, ayahuasca, peyote and magic mushrooms, and those who have been the keepers and stewards of this psychedelic gnosis. Ranging from indigenous elders to spiritual leaders in eastern and western traditions, psychotherapists and fellow seekers such as Ralph Metzner, Houston Smith, Ram Dass and others.

Tomas has been a beacon of hope and a compassionate guide for others seeking to follow the path of warrior wisdom, helping them to find their own way in their personal quests. While he has pointed the way for many to find, he shows up always as a humble learner, not a leader, but a fellow traveler. Ever open to the marvelous mystery of being, brother Thomas has traveled far on the road to warrior wisdom.

I am delighted to welcome him to the Brainforest Café.

[00:01:59] Dennis McKenna: I don’t have any list of questions or anything. I thought we’d just have a good conversation.

[00:02:06] Tom Pinkson: Great.

[00:02:06] Dennis McKenna: You and I go way back and you’ve been doing this for a long time. So how’s it been? You wrote a book called the path of warrior Wisdom or something like that?

[00:02:20] Tom Pinkson: Well, Wisdom warrior… “Psychedelic, shamanic path to transformation”. It’ll be coming out next year.

[00:02:30] Dennis McKenna: Next year.

Well, can you share with us a little bit of your reflections in that book or your reflections in life in general? You are such an icon. I feel like you’re a fellow traveler in a lot of ways and we’ve both been around the block a few times. So what have you learned? What’s the takeaway?

You’re a wise elder now. I guess we both qualify for that. When they start calling you an elder. Next thing you know they’re saying, whatever happened to that guy, right?

Let’s enjoy our moment.

Amen. Because it’s memorable enough.

[00:03:18] Tom Pinkson: It sure is. Yeah.

With gratitude, memory for all our brothers and sisters walking this path with us who are in the spirit world now. We stand on their shoulders or with their support. So remembering all of them, including your brother. So bottom line, what have I learned through over half a century of doing this work and travel around the world and being with elders of different cultures, learning about right relationship with sacred medicine plants?

Well, the bottom line that comes to me just right off the top is we’re way more than we think we are. We’re way, way more than what our western insane culture teaches us to believe is reality and the extent of who and what we are. So the truth of what we are. And medicine helps us to wake up to that, helps us to see the truth in who and what we are and the interconnectedness of all creation. And it helps us to see what our highest potentials are. And it also helps us to see what the inner dynamics are that are blocking the realization of our highest fulfillments of potential. And then it’s on us, whether we do the work or not that the medicine shows us, but what it shows me over all these years and experiences in working with dying people that you know about and other areas of envision quest fasting in the mountains for. This march will be my 50th year doing that. So just trying to open a lens to be able to see deeper than the material world, the material world, as beautiful as it is, which I love, is going deeper and realizing our connection at the deepest level of our being with that infinite creative wisdom, power, the universe, whatever you want to call it. Most recently, three words come to mind. One from ancient language, Aramaic, which means the word is Alaha.

Alaha. It means sacred unity.

So whatever helps us to open our bandwidth of consciousness to a deeper, wider, higher level of awareness so we can recognize and understand Alaha, sacred unity, and live from it with aloha, cosmic love, which is at the center of Our being, the essence of our being. And we’re stardust brought to earth, Stardust brought to birth. And the question is why? Well, to shine. To shine out the truth of who we are. And that’s Wake up, wise up, live love now. And that’s all my cliches for right now.

[00:05:59] Dennis McKenna: Well, let’s wind the time machine way back a little bit. Tell me how you got into this.

What brought you to psychedelics? When was that? And what was the catalyst that brought you into the psychedelic world and these traditions that you’ve been immersed in for so long, can you remember that far back?

[00:06:24] Tom Pinkson: Let me give it a try.

[00:06:26] Dennis McKenna: Okay.

Don’t blame you if you can’t, because sometimes I can’t.

[00:06:32] Tom Pinkson: I have to go back 75 years to when I was three years old and my dad died. And so what I experienced through that Nayarika, so we shall wear that doorway, was something that took me about 15 years to begin to understand and ground and work with skillfully the teaching of impermanence, that everybody you love, anybody you love, that there’s a power called death. That can come and take somebody you love and does not need your permission to do it. That’s reality. That’s reality.

So that was devastating to me as a child. A life threatening illness because there was no vehicle of understanding to help a kid deal with the grief and got nothing in that regard. It all imploded, life threatening illness.

And then teenager, when testosterone hit that which imploded, exploded, violent acting out, juvenile, juvenile delinquent, gang member and getting into a lot of trouble and causing a lot of trouble.

And throughout all of that, what was really an existential question that formed with my dad’s death that I didn’t recognize the question until medicine. My first experience with LSD, having prepared for a year in 65, in 1966, went ahead and opened the doorways with that. LSD helped me see.

[00:08:00] Dennis McKenna: LSD was your portal, was your first entry into the world. As so many, right?

[00:08:09] Tom Pinkson: Yeah. But the interface with indigenous cultures with all of this was twofold. One, the existential question that formed was in a reality where death can come at any time and take somebody you love, doesn’t need your permission. What, if anything, it’s based on, worth living a life on.

And what I saw in the materialist culture that was opulent of the early 50s or actually the late 40s, early 50s. Yeah. Was not giving me anything meaningful to look at. That spoke to my heart and soul. It was all just what you looked like and all external stuff. And it was like… And so it pushed me deeper into looking for people in cultures who were being for real about death, about sex, about life, who saw the truth of what was happening in this country, the racist, white supremacist history of it from the get go.

And so there was a hunger for that. And so I gravitated. When I was 14, I started doing construction work. And this is back on Maryland, on the east coast, which at the end was like the deep south. And I was working mostly with black guys. And when they tested me and I passed their test, they took me in as one. I was doing the same work. So they took me in as one of them.

And therein I made a connection with people who saw the king, didn’t have any clothes in terms of the culture, were being real about what they were feeling, what was going on.

And I felt a kinship there.

When I finally made it out of high school, which I barely did, and came to southern California to go to junior college, I gravitated to the same kind of situation in LA, in Pacoima, to the Chicanos and black guys out there and hung with them a lot, all the while trying to figure out, now take classes in junior college to try to figure out why was they acting out in such a disturbing way as a teenager. And I was always interested in the unconscious mind from when I was ten years old and had a hallucinatory experience with a high fever, precursor to polio. Fortunately, I didn’t get the polio, but it took me into an altered state where I saw the patterns on the wall as I’m suffering in this huge temperature, start to move, undulate as if they’re breathing. And I had nothing in my framework, cognitive framework to try to understand this. So it blew my mind. So I knew from that point there’s something more going on than what my cultures told me. I don’t know what it is or what to do with it, but that is mid 60s, early sixty´s.

I transferred up to San Francisco state as an undergraduate. 1965, right in the height of what I call the renaissance of the movement, opening up through LSD to explore everything culturally. So I stepped right into that. And because of my interest in the unconscious, my interest in psychedelics was, oh, this is a tool that opens the unconscious. I had no spiritual beliefs at the time.

I was atheist, political, involved, fighting the pigs, involved with the Black Panthers and Vietnam day, very active and all that.

So when I was hearing all the stories and the people in the cultural field at the time in the Bay Area speak about LSD, I was interested in the potential for unlocking the unconscious.

And I prepared for a year because I was frightened about what was in my unconscious. So I’m really nervous about what’s going to be unlocked when I go in here. So I worked for a year on myself and finally got to the place of, okay, whatever horrible demons might be lurking in there, I’m willing to face them now and take the risk, and I go ahead in a safe setting, although I didn’t know sacred at the time, I knew respectful. So it was with people I trusted, two, three people who had all experienced LSD and I knew cared about me. So it was a safe setting and took the LSD and just totally blew out the whole fuse box of understanding about reality. And it’s been a new ballgame ever since.

[00:12:32] Dennis McKenna: Well, I think we have a very similar, very similar sort of history that way. The 60s were certainly a time of catalysis for all of us in this space.

It was cultural ferment, and we were all beginning to sort of question a lot of the premises of the so called larger society or respectful society. And one thing that psychedelics do and did for us back in the day was it gives you this different perspective. And this is actually one of the reasons why psychedelics were identified at the time as so dangerous, because in fact they are dangerous. It’s not that they’re dangerous drugs, it’s that they give you dangerous ideas that do not conform with the conventional wisdom, and they cause you to question things and understand that there’s a bigger picture here. And this was not welcomed by the powers that be. And so psychedelics were stigmatized, and people that were into them were also marginalized and discredited as much as possible. And it worked to a certain extent, but some of us persisted, and now look where we are. I think in the current era, we’re kind of witnessing that what goes around comes around.

All of a sudden. These substances that were vilified and condemned and in no way accepted, suddenly they’ve undergone a transformation in the last few years. Now they’re being touted as maybe the last hope for humanity.

I think perhaps that’s an exaggeration, but certainly in the cultural meme sphere, if you want to call it that, the conversation has shifted a lot. It’s got to be encouraging. I do not think necessarily that psychedelics will save the world in themselves, but I think they are tools to help us understand our current era and sort of how we got here. And certainly in my own experience, one of the things that they’ve helped me do, and I think you’re probably in the same boat here, is appreciate the indigenous traditions, the cosmo vision of indigenous people, which is far richer than the understanding of western so called civilization. That’s one thing. And just in general realize that…

What we are fed through the channels of propaganda now more active than other, it gives us the means to question all of these things. And that’s a good thing because I think as a species, what we’re faced with is we need to wake up as a species and acknowledge that in some ways we’re in a heap of trouble.

And these psychedelics are wake up medicines. They’re wake up catalysts for the monkeys. Whether we’ll wake up fast enough, whether we’ll do anything about it fast enough, is all up for grabs. But we have the tools.

The question is, do we have the wisdom to learn from these tools and make the changes? Well, it’s not a settled issue. We’ll have to see.

[00:16:38] Tom Pinkson: So, Dennis, what it brings up for me, what you’re saying is to me, and the medicine has helped me see this in the time and vision quest.

There’s time and altered states in many different ways.

Let me just drop in here, that the underlying root of where all our problems come from that lead to climate change and the social unrest and the horrible violence taking place in Palestine and Israel and other places around the world, seems to me, and I’d be interested in your thoughts and reflections about this in response to what I’m about to say. It seems to me the root cause of it all boils down to the misperception of separation, which our entire western culture is based on. Individualism, and that perception and belief of, quote unquote reality is separate things. Everything’s separate. And as you mentioned, the cosmovision of indigenous people and same realization that the particle physicists are telling us today through their lens, same truth. There’s no such thing as a solid thing. There’s no such thing as a separate thing because there’s no such thing as a solid thing. It’s all interwoven energy. It’s all interwoven energy. It’s all related. It’s all connected. And when we are socialized into believing and living our lives from the perception of separation, that induces fear. We’ve cut off from the source of life, wisdom, power, the energy, life force of the energy. So we’re fearful, and then the fear manifests toward the other. When the ego identity is threatened to violence. And if we really want to change and create the kind of world we’re capable of creating, then we have to not just treat the symptoms, but where does the violence come from? What are the events that are taking place that trigger that kind of fear to that kind of action? And that goes back to that perception of separation, which I was raised in. I think anybody in this culture was raised in western culture, that perception of separation. And it was medicine, the LSD experience, that opened my, like, actually said, cleansed the lens of my perception to be able to see that’s an illusion. We’re all connected. Oh, my God. I’ve been living my life. We’ve been living our life. Back ass words, wherever that expression asks backward.

So to me, that’s the root cause. I don’t think that psychedelics are magically going to heal and change the world, but for an apparently increasing number of people responding to the need to open our consciousness, there is this growing trend of people using medicine, some responsibly and some not. It does have the potential as a tool to open our awareness, to see the deeper reality of our interconnectedness, the Alaha, the unity of the sacred, unity of all creation. So that’s what we need to address to heal that Watico mind virus that leads us to believe in a reality of separation.

[00:19:46] Dennis McKenna: I agree. I think you kind of hit the nail on the head here. And this is one thing the psychedelics do, is they make us realize, they help us to realize that we are, in fact, not separate. This is all an illusion. Everything is connected, including all people. And the violence, the division that we see in our culture serves the purposes of the people that think they’re running things. They’re actually not running things, but they think they’re running things. And this division that it creates economically and politically and culturally, all of these things, it’s all about sort of calling out the other, saying, you look different than me, you think different than me, therefore you’re a bad person.

And so much of this, I think, is basically fear based. Violence and all of this, it’s based on fear. It’s based on what we don’t understand.

So the psychedelics help us shift that perspective a bit and look at the situation through a different lens. We can’t always be loaded on LSD or ayahuasca or whatever. I mean, we can’t carry on normal functions if we’re completely stoned all the time. And that’s not the point.

These altered states should be temporary. It’s like going into a room where certain things can be learned. Then you have to go out into the quote unquote real world and apply what you’ve learned. But what you come away with is the understanding that what we call the real world is not, is as much an illusion as anything else that the culture creates. So in that sense, they’ve been very useful for me.

You and I have been on this path for a long time. And in conversations with younger people, I often get asked, well, you’ve been taking psychedelics for 50 years, 60 years or whatever. What have you learned?

And I have to say, honestly, I’ve learned how little I know.

That’s the message I get from psychedelics.

The more I take them and the older I get, I have to realize I don’t know shit. And really nobody does. Nobody understands this, but I think they’re catalysts to humility. And I think that people forget that the universe is made of mystery. Nature is made of mystery, and we are privileged to understand just a tiny slice of it.

And we have science and science. I am a scientist, and science is a wonderful tool, but sometimes science, it’s interesting to be a scientist and also a psychedelic person because you work in the realm of science, but you always have to keep in front of you the fact that science is just a tool and it doesn’t have any answers.

And if you use it that way as a tool for understanding nature, always with the provision that next week new information may come along that completely overturns what you think you know. And that’s something that people tend to forget. People like to have certainty.

I think psychedelics teach us that there is no certainty.

In fact, what it comes down to is nobody knows what the fuck is going on.

So we just have to accept that, and we have to learn to be in that space and understand that.

Humility, I think, is the start of wisdom in a certain sense.

And going back as far as Socrates, he said this, basically, I don’t know anything. I’m just asking questions, not in the Tucker Carlson sense, but in the sense of a curious monkey who’s trying to understand, recognizing that there probably is no definitive answer. So you try to acknowledge that. You try to understand as much as you can and apply that.

And I think a lot of it has to do with the way that we relate to people, to other people in the first place. We are all one. So let’s get rid of this, you are other and your bad kind of thing. That’s the first thing we have to realize. We’re all monkeys. We’re all in the same boat.

[00:25:19] Tom Pinkson: When you speak of mystery, do you know the Lakota name for what we would call God? You know what that is?

[00:25:29] Dennis McKenna: What is that?

[00:25:30] TomPinkson: Do you know what the Lakota word is for what we would refer to as God?

[00:25:35] Dennis McKenna: No.

[00:25:36] TomPinkson: Waka tanka. And it means sacred mystery.

[00:25:40] Dennis McKenna: There you go. 

[00:25:42] TomPinkson: I think there’s wisdom in a cognitive structure of language that comes to us from people who pay attention for millennia to how it works and the recognition of its mystery. It’s ultimate mystery. Even with all our science, we only know 6% of what’s going on in the universe with dark energy and dark matter. Like you said, we’re clueless. It’s mystery and lakota and indigenous people recognize it’s from that mystery that the energies come that give us life and that we’re dependent on for life. Those energies, we call them spirits, call them whatever. And in order to keep those energies or spirits given life to us, we have to recognize we’re not doing this on our own. There’s a bigger invisible power that’s making this happen in its own mysterious ways, and we need to be not just taking from it, but be giving back and be in respectful relationship. And there’s a couple of more thoughts I’d love to get your reflections on. So, learning from nature, trying to control nature, paying attention to how nature works in the interface of science. So scientists tell us, our western scientists tell us that the dark matter functions like gravity, brings things together, pulls things together. That’s one thing that’s happening with the dark matter. We don’t know what it is, but we can see its effect. And then the other energy that’s just larger, the dark energy is expanding faster and faster and faster. So the universe on the physical plane that we can measure through our scientific instruments, is saying there’s two dynamics going on at the same time. So to me, it brings up in my mind if I’m trying to learn and be in harmony with the way the universe works because it knows what it’s doing. It’s been around for a long time. I don’t know. It’s mysterious, but I know it’s sacred because it’s the source of all. Then, on a personal level, what is it I need to be joining together with inside myself? And how do I need to be expanding and growing bigger? And I think one of the big dynamics of the latter is we need to expand. But the pressures, pressures on us right now, whether humanity is going to survive this rite of passage or not, don’t know. Like you said, it’s up for grabs by what we do. But I think one of the dynamics of what we need to do is follow the universe’s ways of expression, its wisdom, and expand our understanding of who we are. We’re more than our ego bodies and identities in our stories, our ego stories, we’re way much more. And if we don’t open up to that way more in which we’re all interconnected, we’re going to pull the plug on humans, that other species survival on this beautiful mother Earth.

[00:28:34] Dennis McKenna: Right, So perhaps that is the reason that you have been so attracted to indigenous traditions, because the indigenous understanding, the indigenous cosmo vision, if you want to call it that, is actually more scientific than what we think of as our scientific model of the world, because it starts from the premise that it’s a gray mystery.

And this is self-evident if you think about it. As we were saying, the fraction of what we think we understand is always open to question. What we think we understand may not be what we think we understand next week or next year. Indigenous people, indigenous worldview comes from that perspective. And so in some sense, it’s a more scientific understanding of the universe, because it starts out with the acknowledgment, the recognition that most of existence is a black box to us that we probably never will fully understand.

I think that’s it. And again, this comes back to my mind. This comes back to the fact that psychedelics, if you properly integrate what it’s trying to tell you, if you don’t deny it, you cannot not be humble.

You have to be humble in the face of this great mystery. I mean, it’s a gift.

It’s an incredible miracle in some ways, that we as a species have evolved on this planet to have complex nervous systems and eyes and ears and sensory receptors that run on the same molecules, basically, that we find in the plants.

Again, because we’re all part of one. We’re all biochemically related. That’s why these molecules work. That’s why it’s not a question of why, it just is. And so in that sense, I think the indigenous worldview is closer to the way it really is.

An essential maybe difference in attitude is indigenous people can accept that. Our scientifically oriented western civilization is like, no, we have to nail it down.

We have to get all the details squared away. Forget it. It’s not going to happen.

And I think that’s what psychedelics bring us to. And in some ways, it’s not a scientific approach, you know, and I think our need in some ways to our failure to acknowledge this leads to a certain hubris in a certain way, understanding a belief system that somehow we’re running things.

And I think for me, I imagine for you, one of the chief lessons that I get from psychedelics, particularly the ones from nature, is you monkeys aren’t running things.

We only think we’re running things. Actually, if you want to think about it, the plants are running things because they are what’s keeping the biosphere tolerable for life through photosynthesis and carbon sequestration and all of these equilibrium processes that we’re working like crazy to undermine and destabilize. This is what’s so puzzling about our attitude to nature. We’re doing our best to destroy it.

It’s an unfortunate situation.

[00:32:51] Tom Pinkson: I think that comes from that perception of separation, the original alienation, and in that, the anxiety and the fear. We’re disconnected from what’s our birthright, what’s the essence of our being because of some software program that’s been instilled into our minds of belief that’s based on an illusion, based on a misunderstanding of the nature of reality. The true nature of reality.

[00:33:20] Dennis McKenna: Right, and psychedelics let us sometimes they call that the default mode network, which effectively, now, in neural science, that’s a buzzword. Effectively, it’s this. I prefer to call it the reality hallucination.

We construct it for our convenience. It’s based on, a lot of it is about what we filter out.

Information comes into us through our senses, our perception. But if everything came through, it would just be a blooming, buzzing confusion. The brain and the sensory apparatus is very selective in terms of what it lets in, so that we can make sense of the world. But it’s important to remember, we don’t inhabit reality. We inhabit a model of reality.

Reality itself is unperceivable in a certain sense. So the indigenous people had it right. They have it right. If we could learn that more, if we could interiorize that lesson, I think we’d be not only more humble, but wiser in general.

[00:34:36] Tom Pinkson: I think it offers one course toward creating a response to the cultural, social, environmental challenges we’re going through. And addressing the root causes of those problems is to go back to think about the baby when it’s born. It’s an energy in a particular pattern and form for a period of time, embedded in a larger, indefinite field. And like you alluded to a moment ago, it’s getting bombarded with energy coming through its different senses into its nervous system and brain. And you can’t function with being open in the way the baby is when it first comes in. So different cultures teach us unconsciously what to pay attention to and what not to pay attention. Gradually, different sensitivities to different levels of vibrations are cut off, blocked from awareness, based on what the culture tells you is important to pay attention to. And our culture, western mainstream culture, has indoctrinated us in the sense of like Greejiv spoke about, the most effective prison is the one you don’t know you’re in, that we’re in this prison that we don’t know we’re in, of perception operation. And if somebody tries to talk to you about that, unless you’ve had an experience with one expression nonduality, with experiencing that which exists beyond the perception of ego identity as a separate thing from everything else, where it’s no wonder we’re taking anxiety pills and all kinds of distractions, more and more, bigger and glottier and more bells and whistles to distract us, to keep us asleep from the truth that medicine can open us up to. And that’s why, like you said earlier, Max Rafferty I think was head of the department of education in California. A right wing schmuck. Back in the guess, it was said one of the most dangerous threats to our culture is LSD.

[00:36:49] Dennis McKenna: Yes, absolutely.

[00:36:52] Speaker A: You see the king doesn’t have any clothes on. You see the king doesn’t say, holy shit, man, I’ve been believing a lie my whole fucking life, man. It’s all based on a misperception of reality. This is insane.

[00:37:04] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, quite so. I love that. Yeah. The most effective prison is the one we don’t know we’re in. That’s a gem. Gurdjieff said that?

Yeah, he had it right.

This is a thing. And I think the psychedelics, they’re the tool that we can tunnel through the wall and get out of that prison and into something that more resembles the way things are.

[00:37:41] Tom Pinkson: Which is the indigenous cosmo vision of reality. Because their culture, from the get go, you go back to the very beginning, humanity as a primate, they’re only going to survive if we pay attention to what’s going on around us and learns how to work with it in a way to survive and get the food to grow, to produce the next generation and keep it going. The only way you’re going to do that is if you pay attention. The rhythms of cycles of animals, plants, seasons, everything. You have to pay attention the way it actually works. And so your perception that comes in from the culture to the baby indigenous culture before it got stomped by the western invasion force, is to pay attention to the way it works with humility, because it’s not your show. You’re a part of it, you’re in it, but you’re not running the show. Something bigger than you pay attention to that. Learn how to be in a respectful relationship with it, so it heightens the chances of you surviving and your species surviving and life surviving if you do that.

Our culture teaches us, pay attention to consumer driven, corporate, monetary gain of capitalism is the most important thing. And so that’s about things and power and status and competition.

[00:38:59] Dennis Mckenna: Our culture is rigged to create distraction. That’s what it’s all about.

You’re absolutely right. Our task is to pay attention and to focus. And our culture is set up for so many distractions, and that’s part of the game plan. If we keep people distracted, watching their videos and doing their social media, and all know, then effectively they will be blind to what’s really going on. And yeah, LSD was identified as one of the most dangerous things in the culture at the time, and that’s effectively what there was. Timothy Leary was called the most dangerous man in America, and he may well have been at that time in some sense, and these perceptions are still a threat. So I guess that brings the question, why has there been this cultural shift in the last, say, two decades about psychedelics suddenly?

Well, not suddenly, but over that period, they’ve become less threatening, more accepted.

Why is that happening? They’re still, in the sense of their potential to change minds.

Why are they becoming more accepted now? Or is that an illusion? What’s going on?

[00:40:38] Tom Pinkson: I don’t think that’s an illusion, but it came to me a number of decades ago, actually, with the increasing popularity, particularly of ayahuasca around the world.

My first ayahuasca experience was with your brother and this place in Hawaii with this batch that he just brewed up, he was testing.

But then I went on to, I’ve been working with the ayahuasca ever since. I was wondering, I don’t know how many years. So a number of decades ago, I was reflecting on, why is this particular subject going around the world, just all over the place, and with people you never think would be going to an ayahuasca experience? And so all of listening in, this is what came up for me. See, what it brings up for you is you think about.

I helped start the first at home hospice program in the United States back in the 70s. Worked with children and families with life threatening illness for over 30 years. And so I sat at the bedside in hospitals and homes with many really difficult sufferings of people and children going through in their illness and in their dying process.

And one of the things that happens when we get sick, right, we get a fever. The wisdom inside the body immune system gets a fever to try to heat things up and burn things up. We might get diarrhea, we might throw up to try to clean things out. There’s stuff going on here that needs to be cleaned out, needs to be released and replaced with healthy energy to survive and to go forward.

As the climate crisis and social crisis heated up, literally and figuratively, what I saw was the immune system of mother Earth. The plants, the sacred plants that work with mind and spirit and body are part of the immune system of mother Earth. And so in response to the illness that she was feeling, she started releasing more of her immune system responses, and ayahuasca being one of those. And that’s why it was spreading around the world, to try to help wake people up in consciousness that were more than our egos, were, more than what our culture is, condition us to believe is who we are, and what we are and what’s important in life. Material gain and acquisition, power, status. There’s more important things in life. And you continue to pursue those things which your billions of dollars a year spend to copy your attention, to do precisely those distractions and not see the truth of what’s going on and contribute unconsciously to the systems that continue to destroy the world. So the medicine cuts through all of that. And it’s not just enough to take the medicine, I think it’s important to take it. And indigenous people’s ceremonies are really models of respectful relationship with these sacred plants, how to get the most out of them, by opening up humility, by opening up receptivity, by opening up empowered ability to focus and sustain concentration on what’s happening and take it in and listen to it. And I think we take medicine, be they mushrooms, anything organic that comes out of mother Earth, that’s coming out more into the public mind because the times are more and more desperate whether we’re going to make it or not, if we don’t wake up pretty soon.

I just found out my bank, Chase bank, invests in oil. I’m trying to call up a corporate and I haven’t been able to talk to anybody to say, how can you justify this? And I’m going to keep trying to get through it, that when we take this medicine, we incur responsibility. Because the medicine, the ayahuasca plants, vine, the mushroom, whatever the plant is we take, it’s a life that’s equally valuable in indigenous Cosmo vision and understanding as our lives. So in effect, these gifts from Mother Earth that use rightly or tools to open us up and wake us up, are they giving their lives to help our lives. And so we incur a debt of responsibility to step forward in our lives, open our conscious and take action steps to try to create, pull the plug, you might say, on the unconscious conditioning, open up consciousness to wisdom, guidance about how to respond to the crises that can open the doorway to bring through true healing of what indigenous people call the sacred hoop of life.

[00:45:23] Dennis McKenna: Right

[00:45:24] Dennis McKenna: Yeah.

[00:45:25] Dennis McKenna: I think your analogy that ayahuasca and mushrooms and these natural psychedelics are, I’ve often said, and I feel that these are medicines for the soul and they heal the soul not only on the individual level, but on the collective level, on the societal level, ultimately on the biosphere level. I mean they work on all of those things. And I think that is the reason maybe again, going back to the idea that we’re not really running this show, the plants, the fungi, the community of sentient species are actually running this show and they sense that we’re in a tremendous ecological crisis. So they’re bringing these things forward.

Indigenous people have been the stewards of this knowledge, these plants, this wisdom, for so long, now it’s spreading beyond that. And some people say, well, these should remain the property of indigenous people. Indigenous people don’t think of them as property. I feel that they’re the common heritage of humanity. These are a gift from mother Gaia, if you will, to the problematic primates. We’re the problematic primates. We’re the ones that need to be slapped upside the head and say, wake up.

These are the catalysts to do it. This is a message that’s coming from the biospheric level. And unfortunately, we have not recognized the role that indigenous people have played. They understand it. I mean, in some sectors they do. But I think this is what’s going on.

I’m a biologist more than an anthropologist. I mean, I’m sort of both, but I believe that this tremendous diversity of chemistry that the plant kingdom is able to originate is a reflection, effectively, of this wisdom that’s built into biology itself.

We’ve got photosynthesis, but because through that we have a tremendous number of molecules, that some are psychedelic, most are not, but they have other types of elite properties. So I think that’s probably, if I wanted to come up with a rationale, why are these being accepted or why are they spreading all over the world? I think it’s a response of the sentient community of species, or Gaia, which I think is a reasonable concept. Gaia is trying to send a message to us to wake up before it’s too late.

I feel like life itself on the planet is probably going to persist.

We may not.

Your analogy of the immune system, we’re the antigens.

We’re the ones that bringing forth all of these antigens against this virus, which is all these monkeys crawling around ruining things. So it’s playing out and it plays out over vast time frames. This is the other thing. As a species, we have a hard time looking 5000, 500,000 years ahead. We can’t even look at next year or five years down the line. This is one of our problems, that we’re so bound by our historical perspective, which is very narrow, that we can’t see the larger picture.

[00:49:49] Tom Pinkson: Yeah, indigenous people, as you know, you’ve heard that expression when they’re making decisions, you say, well, let’s think into the future, let’s think seven generations. How is this act that we’re going to do whatever it is going to affect seven generations, not next quarter’s bottom line.

[00:50:06] Dennis McKenna: And that’s more like nature. That’s more the timescale that nature works on. Much longer timescales. The problem is that it seems that the processes that are destabilizing the biosphere are accelerating. We don’t have the luxury of seven generations. We may not have the luxury of one generation.

I feel like you and I are not going to be around that much longer. Let’s face it, we’re old guys, we’re geezers, but we have kids and they have kids and so on. And I worry a lot about what is going to happen, what kind of a world those our children and our children’s children are going to grow up in.

That’s not exactly an optimistic view, but a more realistic one.

[00:51:09] Tom Pinkson: So it brings up that concern, having three grandsons, that concern that we share and that so many share, has led me to several, you might say, push points. One is to develop rites of passages for my three grandsons when one when they were ten years old, one when they were 13, and one when they were 16, with their friends, to try to, as best I could in our culture, do what a rite of passage does in indigenous culture to the young person, which is take them through some kind of ordeal rite that opens themselves up to the more of who they are and how it’s all about relationship with everything, because there’s no such thing as it’s separate. And the rites of passages expose them to the powers of the universe and to be in respectful, humble relationship with them. So you might be able to call on those powers through spiritual attunement to help you with your challenges. So with my grandkids and other kids, it’s like, what can you and I, us geezers, with what we’ve learned? And we’ve been very fortunate and blessed, both of us, to have thought it out and been guided by the bigger powers, whatever, to incredible teachings of experience with people from other cultures and with these sacred medicines.

What might we be able to give back to the generations coming up that’s going to be able to help them create responses to the crises that are going to increase when we’re gone? What, if anything, can we pass on to them or help them open their experience to learning about that can help them to meet those crises after we’re gone? So that’s one thing I’ve done, is those rites of passages and the ceremonies that I continue to do sometimes with family and with other people using the sacred medicines to open that doorway of consciousness and show up and recognize, take ownership, that we do have the ability to co create with the wisdom power of the universe, the kind of world that’s healthy and just and peaceful, and it’s a win win world for all. We have the ability to do that not on our ego power, but by opening up to the larger power that gives us life. And it’s always giving us through nature, it’s always giving us information about how to be in relationship with its changing patterns and energy fluctuations.

That’s harmonious, that’s in harmony with it, that promotes life.

The medicine’s coming out of mother Earth to wake us up and say, you don’t have much more time, so let’s get on it.

[00:54:03] Dennis McKenna: I think this is so important. This is exactly it.

I am encouraged that young people seem to be cut from a wiser cloth. They are internalizing these medicines, these perceptions, these understandings that the medicine gives you. Not that they are all taking them, but the cultural meme is spreading, and I have met, and I’m sure you have to, some remarkable, not only intelligent, but compassionate, decent young people.

I put a lot of hope in that, and there’s always hope. My dad always used to say, while there’s life, there’s hope. And that seems like a trivial thing to say, but it’s actually a profound insight. It’s true. And I put a lot of hope in the coming generation because they see it and much more than their elders do. And so that’s what we have to have, a certain amount of faith that they’ll come up with some solution. I’m not big on faith in general, but I do have faith in future generations.

And it’s not too late. We can wake up.

Well, and we’re coming up to the top of the hour, and I think we’ve covered some of the main points. Is there anything that you have not said that you’d really like to say before we close this off?

[00:55:50] Tom Pinkson: Well, just building on what you were just talking about with the next generation, I think you and I, as elders and others of our ilk and have walked this path, a real question is, how can we support the next generation? That’s what indigenous cultures do. The elders support the youngsters, and the youngsters teach the elders. But our job as elders is what can we do to support these young generation coming up? So they get the support from us to help them grow to their fullest capabilities, to be changed, to create the kind of world we were capable of creating. And Dennis, thank you. Just gratitude to you for this time together. I can’t see you, that’s why my eyes are closed. But I appreciate, respect the work you’ve done in your life, are doing, and the good man and good person you are. So thank you for you.

[00:56:39] Dennis McKenna: Well, thank you, Tom, I feel the same way about you.

You’ve walked this path a long time and I think we’re doing what we can do in this time, exactly this. Trying to transmit these insights and understanding to the younger generation by doing things like this, doing this podcast, doing like the book you wrote. I hope many people will buy and read that book. Can you tell me again what the title is and where people will be able to get it?

[00:57:19] Speaker A: It’s being published by Inner Traditions, which published my first book, I don’t know, 30 years ago, about working with the Huichol in Mexico. And the tentative title, they may change it, I don’t know, is Wisdom warriors. That’s really what we’ve been talking about, warriors, not in terms of external battles, but internal battles so that we can overcome our own destructive forces and come forth with light and love. And the way to do that in my own life that we’ve been talking about here is through a psychedelic shamanic pathway to transformation. That’s the test. It’s supposed to be out towards the end of next year.

[00:57:56] Dennis McKenna: The end of next year. Okay, so maybe it’s on already listed inner traditions publishing.

I would urge anyone who’s moved by this conversation to go there, preorder the book and read it and share it with people you respect.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, Tom. I appreciate you.

[00:58:22] Tom Pinkson: My pleasure. Take good care.

[00:58:25] Dennis McKenna: Okay, bye bye.