The Entities that Exist Within Psychedelics | With Dennis McKenna

Carl Jung spent years talking to entities of his imagination documenting that books like the red book he made that a Visionary practice and had Illuminating conversations with specters of his own imagination but of course he also believed that there was a collective element to those and so you might say that well to to the degree for example that we're each inhabited by dark impulses we might say well we're each pray to the same demonic forces that's one way of thinking about it and they're the same and they're transpersonal and they exist to some degree cross-culturally

and they spend time and so these creatures of imagination can have histories and can inhabit Us in some real sense and they can do that collectively and then so so that complicates things tremendously but then I would also ask in your investigations your long-term investigations of multiple Ayahuasca experiences across different people are there any commonalities of entities that strike you as particularly significant I know people talk about clown figures for example mechanical clowns in the DMT State and elf machines and this sort of Elvis yeah yeah exactly the health machines and of course that's that's

complicated too because once one person starts talking about it that might increase the probability that other people would experience it but have you seen commonalities of entity experience that would suggest something the existence of something that is is at least transpersonal even though it might also still be subjective whatever that means in such a context yes yes I I I have and I think this exists in these in these uh shamanic Traditions uh and the ayahuascias are particularly good uh good example of of that you know uh uh and and again I I have not

seen anything that convinces me I mean I'm basically a jungian you know so I believe in the collective unconscious is this uh it's a good model this this transpersonal realm of shared archetypes and all that and then there's the individual unconscious I haven't seen anything in the reports of the Psychonauts that would that would not fit into that model that says oh well this doesn't really fit this is outside that model and it and it and so that model's not valid I haven't seen that I I think that it is I think basically these entities

they are experienced as real but they come from the collective unconscious and if you if you look at uh the Ayahuasca traditions and there is a uh an interesting book here that that's very illustrative of this which many people know about it's uh it's the book that uh you're familiar with the artist Pablo amaringo the the Visionary Peruvian artist he and Luis Eduardo Luna wrote a uh a book he painted his Visions right he remembered all his Visions in perfect detail painted these visions and Eduardo and he collaborated on a book called Ayahuasca Visions the

religious iconography of a Peruvian shaman uh it's still in print the book is remarkable because it's its typical coffee table style format with full color illustrations of of the Visions on one page and then wordo's descriptions in English on the facing page dissecting all the elements of the entities and everything else that you see in these Visions as narrated by Pablo I mean public you know Eduardo Luna was was basically just the transcriber but uh uh Pablo described in great detail dissected each one of these paintings and the and they're about I guess 20 or

so of these of these paintings in this book and it's basically a course in vegetalismo it's talking about digitalismo this this practice which is really a amalgam of many indigenous traditions and and kind of mushed together into a mestizo tradition but he describes uh these entities you know they all have names they have a particular appearance and you know the plants the animals even you know there are UFOs there are all kinds of things in this in these Visions Pablo describes every one of them and any ayahuascaro in in training work you know in my

parentheses under under Pablo or any of these traditional uh ayahuas Heroes they're gonna see these things you know I mean this is a cultural context they're going to see these things and what they see is going to be similar you know so it's sort of like it's sort of like uh terence's uh you know self-transforming elf machines I mean Terence says that you know he has a huge voice in the meme sphere pretty soon it's everybody's seen self-transforming elf machines you know people that's what people see post-modernism is tearing our world apart the one thing

that may be able to unite us is a mass return to Our judeo-christian Roots at the individual level that means developing our prayer life there's a ton of literature out there on the benefits of secular New Age mindfulness meditation but what isn't talked about nearly enough is the power of a consistent prayer life that's where hallow comes into play hallow is the number one Christian Prayer app in the U.S and the number one Catholic app in the world hallow features over 5 000 prayers and meditations including daily prayers to help you build a habit of

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and it's it seems to me that it's highly probable that the way that we we organize information is in the form of personality so I mean and I certainly got a fair bit of this from thinking about Jung's work I mean if you're inhabited by a rage state which I think is a good way of thinking about it you might think well what form does the anger take and the answer is well it has a personality you might act like enraged people that you've seen in movies you might act like enraged people that you've seen

in your life the rage has a goal which is the crushing of the opponent let's say and it has perceptions and it has action patterns it's a personality and you could conceptualize the rage Spirit as Aries the God of War and that would be a perfectly reasonable way of looking at it and it could be that all of our micro perceptions and all of our macro perceptions for that matter have the intrinsic form of personality and that that's partly what we encounter when we dream and so I was thinking too you know that as as

the gods if the gods are Aggregates of micro personalities that might be one way of thinking about it they're micro personalities that are aggregated within societies across time and then and then can be apprehended collectively to some degree As you move towards a monotheistic vision of the world what you're moving toward is the ultimate aggregation of all these socially modified micro personalities into one conceptual scheme and that would parallel that hierarchy that of cognition and conception that well we already discussed that people like friston are working on and so it isn't that surprising I suppose

if you think about it that way if the brain is a personality producing machine so to speak that there are certain states that you can encounter under the influence of chemical alteration where you encounter those personalities even those that have some degree of autonomy I mean rage has some degree of autonomy and so does lust and so does thirst and so does hunger they're not they're not exactly you they're forces or personalities which is a more accurate way of thinking about that you can fall prey to and so why can't why can't that occur in

a more complex manner well I I think it can I mean I mean this this totally fits within the yogi in a bottle you know that that within the collective unconscious there are these these uh I forget the exact term that he used but these these complexes almost like uh uh autonomous personalities you know and and and and and multiple personality disorder is a recognized thing and I guess in some ways all of us have it in a certain sense in that we have you know we do have these multiple personalities but they like rage

lust and and and so on but they they don't take over the controls you know most of the time they're suppressed to a certain degree but they're always there their influencing whoever it is in the in the cabin in at the bridge that's running the thing and in pathology they can't take over you know and then you've got a problem well they do with Tourette's Syndrome they do with Tourette's they do with obsessive compulsive disorder and you know you know and you you can think about the relationship between these motivational States like Rage or anxiety

let's say that that are transpersonal in that everyone experiences them we know that with the Psychedelic experience that set is very important and that if someone is in a negative emotional state or situation that elicits fear and let's say rage and then they Embark Upon A psychedelic experience that that particular State can be magnified beyond belief and so that's a good way to have a hellish experience and so you know we we do have to remember and I know of course you do that the Psychedelic experiences that we're talking about are ritualized so that a

an absolutely Dreadful outcome is less probable but you might say if it was just done randomly it could easily be the Magnifique magnification of a state of Terror or a state of Rage as the magnification as a state of Enlightenment or Bliss right so this is the importance of the ritual of the ritual context this is exactly that what these Traditions have grown around is the idea that there needs to be a an appropriate set and setting there needs to be an appropriate scent the most important variable certainly and uh uh you know I sometimes

say in my talks I say Ayahuasca is a liquid Ayahuasca will fill any vessel you create for it