[00:00:13] Speaker A: Welcome to Brainforest Cafe with Dennis McKenna.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Doctor Bruce Dahmer is a scientist working in the field of astrobiology, with his passion being working on the mystery of the origin of life and where life might arise in the universe. Back at our ESPD conference in 2022, he came out of the psychedelic science closet in his talk. It's high time for science.
This talk at which I was sitting in the front row, sparked a movement that has today led to a new organization, the center for minds multidisciplinary investigation into novel discoveries and solutions.
Minds is modeled on maps and seeks to go beyond psychedelics in the therapeutics and bring online practices and tools to use them to catalyze creativity in science, tech, design, and even leadership. Bruce, it's such a pleasure to welcome you to the rainforest cafe. I've been looking forward to this for a long time, so thank you for making the time.
[00:01:38] Speaker A: It's my pleasure and an honor, Dennis, to be in your world again.
[00:01:45] Speaker B: Well, I would say the feeling is mutual. I look back, back very fondly on our time together at ESPD, where you gave that wonderful talk. And then this article that you shared with me just now is amazing. You're a true psychonaut in a certain sense. I mean, people throw that word around very loosely. But the interesting thing about you, Bruce, is that you've always been a psychonaut.
Long before you discovered psychedelic drugs, you had this internal navigation system into these realms of non ordinary reality that was a source of inspiration for you and a source of knowledge. And even though you avoided coming into psychedelics for a long time, fearing that it would disrupt these very delicate mechanisms that you discovered in your own mind, in your own brain at the age of about eleven, and then gradually learned to control the levers and the buttons that made that work, then you made the transition into psychedelics. And my brother was either the, in some ways he was somewhat of a catalyst.
He either deserves the, the blame for disrupting this internal mechanism or expanding it. And I think what happened was it expanded it. So would you like to tell us a little bit about how you got into that and how you entered this realm of psychedelics from cruising on the natch?
I guess we could put it without psychedelics. You certainly probed many worlds on your own before you got acquainted with psychedelics.
[00:03:43] Speaker A: Yeah, and it actually goes back to about when I was nine. And I could ask for the listeners of a brain forest cafe. How many of you then when you were age of nine, some of you might be nine right now. And how many of you even today, if you've had a stimulating day, or, say, for instance, you're falling to sleep on an airplane or you're at some kind of high altitude, because I've noticed this effect that when you close your eyes and before you go to sleep, you see all these flashes and washes and even color and even some kind of an object, objects. And that's actually called hypnagogia or hypnagogia. And I know that your brother Terence talked about hypnagogic states.
And those I noticed when I was about nine, and I realized they were pretty delicate. Not only would you suddenly you'd leave the hypnagogic movie scene because you just fall asleep, so you'd lose it, but if you kept a certain resolve and you pulled yourself into like an observer, and I call it my clear marble, my crystal sphere, then I would observe these things and turn off all the brain functions, turn off concerns and lists and what your brother may or may not be doing and all those sorts of things, and just become absolutely just the observer. And you can sit in that spot. And then suddenly this hypnagogia starts to wind up, it starts to resolve like a tv channel.
And it. I realized at age nine, this is about 1971. This is when you and your brother were in La Terra. I was learning how to trip out on the natch, back in 71, which was if I could dial all these things back in my brain.
These things resolved into full landscapes, invisible landscapes. And about ten or eleven, I decided to make it a practice to not let it go away, because I thought, well, you know, I noticed older teenagers don't seem to be kind of. No one's talking about this, and I bet you it goes away unless you train for it. So I trained. And then around, you know, eleven or twelve years old, I started to draw from this place and drew all these things I called weird machines, which were my version of machine elves. In some ways, they were sort of partly describing early seventies, you know, Sci-Fi movie type visuals. Visuals, but they became very vivid. I developed full landscapes, maps, planets, interplanetary stuff. All that stuff was then running from that point on. And through my teen years, it became a sort of simulacrum.
An operating system was always online, and I could turn it, I could tune it, and I focused it on game design at one point, and it designed, was able to use it to design an entire elaborate board game.
And then when I discovered computers when I was 18 or 19, it became the simulacrum for writing software. And virtual worlds, things like this in computers. So all of that stuff was. It became the tools of my profession because I managed to keep it going and strengthen it. And today I call it endo tripping for endogenous, or on the natch tripping.
[00:07:31] Speaker B: So this goes far beyond simple hypnagogia. I mean, this is. I don't think most people experience this kind of thing. Would you, do you think? I mean, you developed a skill, basically, to be in this state. Would you compare it to lucid dreaming? It sounds like it might be something like that. People train for lucid dreaming. Is it something like that?
[00:07:58] Speaker A: I've actually also sort of applied it to lucid dreaming.
I find it somewhat different. So about ten years ago, I sort of started to study all of this. David J. Brown was writing a book on lucid dreaming, and I wrote a little piece for that book on some lucid dreaming experiences that I had that were, you're waking up. So instead of falling asleep and having hypnagogia, and the flip side on the other bookend, you're waking up and you have this vivid download, this late night, early morning dream set that comes in. And I did that for the design of a lunar base.
So NASA actually had contracted me and my team to figure out how to use robotics to build a lunar base before astronauts would get there. And what I had done is mainlined all of the previous studies for six or seven months. And then it just all came in one big rush in the morning as a lucid dream. And it was different than endotripna. So I've started to sort of characterize that endo tripping isn't sort of associated with waking up, sort of waking dreams. It's actually a full takeover.
And it often happens open eyed in the day, you know, walking around kind of a thing. It just. And it takes you over and takes you into a very different state than a dream state. It's like, it's a full download. And out there in the audience, if you've seen the.
It's an online mini series called Genius, and it's about Albert Einstein, and it actually depicts his endotrips, or what he called his Gdankan experiment. This thought experiment depicts it beautifully. And there's one in which he's sort of pulled into this light beam. That's his famous 16 year old running alongside a beam of light.
Yeah. There's another one where he's a man falling in an elevator that's in free fall.
And that's a depiction of an endo trip.
[00:10:15] Speaker B: Indeed, yes. So you had similar access to these types of experiences. I think it's interesting effectively because you had this endo trip skill or gift or whatever it was which you could cultivate, you could learn to control it. I'm reminded in many indigenous societies a shaman or a curadero knows that they are special and the people in the community knows that they're special before, before they may ever get in contact with any plant medicines.
And it seems to me that in your early childhood, before you were even concerned with any psychedelics or when you did know about them, you tended to, you stayed away because you were concerned it was disrupt this. But you were a visionary from early childhood. You were actually, you had 1ft in this versionary realm of imagination and ordinary reality, what we mundanely call ordinary reality, which of course isn't ordinary at all, but it's our day to day reality.
When psychedelics came along and you did cross that threshold, you were more than prepared. This was familiar territory to you.
And the psychedelics kind of expanded the portal.
But youd already been quite at home, if its possible to say that in these not ordinary realms of imagination, which go far beyond dreaming because theyre so coherent and theyd make sense, you had visions of machines, for example, that you could actually draw and presumably had ideas about how those things worked. You know, so I'm, and this is a trope that's been said of other geniuses, like Nikola Tesla for example. He had visions of machines, you know, that he went and built the machines or some of them. So in a sense, I think that you were already, you were selected to be a whatever the term you want to call it, a psychodont is one term. It so poorly encompasses your experiences, but it's an impoverished term.
That's what you have been doing since early childhood. And psychedelics was just another phase in this, but an important phase.
[00:13:08] Speaker A: Yeah. And in fact I remember the moment. So your brother walked into my house here at ancient oaks, where you stayed several times with Ralph Abraham. So Ralph Abraham brought Terrence and Finn over in 1998, and I sat them down in front of a big screen to show Terence cyberspace, to show him virtual worlds with avatars in them, these sort of visible landscapes made out of language, if you will.
[00:13:39] Speaker B: Right.
[00:13:40] Speaker A: We hit it off, and at one point he turned it, he turned to Finn and said, well, I guess we got to go buy a new pc.
And they did. They did. They probably went to Fry's electronics and probably put it in his checked bag or something to go back to Hawaii. And we made a date at that point, and the date was the following, that I would come to his house in Hawaii, the new one, the sort of hexagonal one that's been finished only a couple of years before. And he would. We would do a virtual alchemical powwow in a virtual world office satellite dish on the mountain, a mountainside of the side of the volcano there in south Kona. And before that, he would provide me a supply of mushrooms, which he did. And supposedly. And, you know, it's hard. Hard to. I still have some of them, by the way.
They are like from the original clones.
[00:14:46] Speaker B: The original la terra strain, the amz strain, the amazing strain, the amazing strain.
[00:14:54] Speaker A: And a whole nice sack of them. And so I went out with a friend down into the southern Sierra. I'm 36 years old, so I'm no spring chicken.
I thought now is the time, because Terrence, he's not crazy. He's a little cracked, but he's not. He's not crazy. And so I probably won't completely lose it, right? You know, the whole Nancy Reagan war on drugs, you know, frying pan with an egg in it kind of era that was happening when. When I was younger, right? But the. So I went out and there was this big sack, and here's. Here's how it went down. I've really not described it to too many people, but why not?
So the first night I took just a couple of them just as a test, you know, titration for the nation, right? Start with a smaller dose. Try to figure out what's effective. And there were all these kind of fragments of fractal kind of things that came on by the evening. And I sort of looked at them and I took my observer position and they weren't resolving into anything. And I said, oh, come on, you can do better than that.
I can do better than that.
Much better than this. This is just. This is just kind of visual dross. It's nothing. It's one to look at, but this.
[00:16:24] Speaker B: Is like noise on the television, right? This is not anywhere.
[00:16:29] Speaker A: Yeah, this is not going anywhere.
[00:16:30] Speaker B: So very disappointing, those initial experiences.
[00:16:34] Speaker A: And I thought, doggone it. So the next night I said, you know, I'm just going to eat them until I'm stuffed.
[00:16:43] Speaker B: Bad lied to you, bad luck.
[00:16:46] Speaker A: And I had a. Had a little jug of juice, like of to take them down. I didn't get any kind of an upset stomach, but I had a jug of apple juice. So I'll just. I'll eat them until I'm and I'll just drink this juice until I'm, like, completely stuffed with them. And I definitely got stuffed, I'll tell you. Because within, you know, about a half an hour, I crossed over, like, hard crossed over in no visual world, left in the void, completely in a void. So a little bit of a panic came up, and I tried out. I started to scream for help. I allowed my system to just get taken over by the fear thing about being completely in a void.
I went into my observer, into my little crystal sphere, and watched the effect of the scream. Okay, we're doing this. And it shook everything, so it didn't produce much other than this incredibly disturbing field. Every time that I scream for help, and I thought, well, this is probably a bad trip. That's how bad trips are made, right? So we'll stop that and let's go to another way. What should we do next? Let's. Let's start to sing.
And later on, I found out that Terrence had this advice of start humming or overtoning if you're really in a pickle. But I didn't know this beforehand. I also didn't know Terrence's advice. Get a scale.
Get a scale.
[00:18:22] Speaker B: That's step one, right?
[00:18:25] Speaker A: Right. So somewhere after a dozen or 15 grams, you know, that's the state I was in. So I started to sing, and I realized that it would help me determine if my body was still taking in air all those sorts of things. The singing created this beautiful tendrils of light, beautiful effects. So I said, okay, I'll ride this for a while, because obviously it's going to go somewhere, you know? But where? Let's just see it, and let's pay attention. And this wiggle of a little thought started that. Wait a minute.
In this kind of state, you can see beyond, like, even beyond the earth. And suddenly there was the limb of the earth, which is the kind of curve of it came. I realized I was going outside, and there was this huge impact, this huge kind of reification of the universe that happened and everything pouring down into a center, into a reignition, an actual the end. It was literally the recon crescents of the cosmos happened in that trip, and that's possibly a tale for another time. But I was able to be the observer, and I was able to take notes to do my normal thing of, okay, how are we feeling? Oh, what is the teaching here? It's all about being in a state of love, being in community, not being alone. This is the message for going into that fireball that fireball is how it includes.
And so I was doing my normal endotripping thing of let's pay attention, let's really respect this. And that first psychedelic trip was the contract for all the rest of them, which was relationship with the medicine, relationship with whatever shows up. If it's an embodied thing, it's an agreement, set of agreements on the way in. It's a dance, it's a relationship, it's dialogue, and it's ongoing dialogue, it's presence.
And that became sort of the.
The modus operandi for me, for psychedelic, the psychedelic experience.
[00:20:56] Speaker B: Very interesting, but psychedelics are an intensely personal type of relationship. In your Essay, you spoke more about ayahuasca than mushrooms. Mushrooms may have gotten you started, but for many years, a period of years perhaps, that even continues now. You developed a very personal relationship with ayahuasca, even to the extent of externalizing it, as many people do. They think of it as she is a feminine intelligence that is transmitting information. And who's to say it's not that, that's many people's. That's many people's experience? But you were well primed for that relationship through your mushroom Experiences. And you're Lucid, or you're not Lucid Dreaming, but your Endo Tripping, which you were Familiar with. So then Ayahuasca seemed to be just a natural next step. And in a certain way, that's what I was referring to when I alluded earlier to the Notion that in some sense you always have been a shaman.
You discovered the medicines, but you were connecting. You were cruising the cosmos, or non ordinary reality through endotripping before you even got to know ayahuasca or any psychedelics. So it seemed like you were in some ways the perfect student. If ayahuasca is a teacher, it's like somebody like you comes along and Ayahuasca says, yeah, this guy, this guy, I have a lot to teach and he has the mind to receive it and understand it. And that led to tremendous insights about the origin of life and these very intense experiences about how life appeared on the earth and all the processes. And you had, again, Im reminded of, I think it was Jacques Manon that says chance favors the prepared mind, and you had enough of a knowledge base to actually visualize. So when these visions came along, there was the narrative. I get this too, when I had my photosynthesis vision, although it didnt seem like it was nearly as deep as what you had, but you had this intelligence narrating whats happening, explaining this is what youre watching. Heres whats going on.
And as a result, you came up with these theories about the origin of life, which turned out to be the current paradigm, basically, yeah.
[00:24:03] Speaker A: And it was a dennis a long process, because even though I was sort of a natural born tripper, when I took those first mushrooms from Terence, what I did, I did something really specific. I reached into my mind and I turned off the control panel for my endo tripping system, some kind of a little control panel. I left my observer running because that observer is really helpful, and that observer, I think, people develop through meditation practice also.
But I turned it off because I was still reticent about disturbing the machinery, the natural renderer, and I left it turned off on every, each and every psychedelic journey for the next twelve years. So whether it was through all the classic psychedelics, I kept that system powered off. I didn't let it run in parallel. But when I came to ayahuasca, it was a long process of first, my healing, and I was adopted out at birth. I was literally given from my mother's arms into an adoption ward in Victoria, BC in 1962. And I worked through all that. So with ayahs help, if Aya is sort of an embodied co traveler, I literally worked through that rupture that happens to adopt babies.
And we know you can look in the literature and adoptees have something like 50% to 100% more cases of psychiatric hospitalization.
Theres a lot of issues that happen when the infant doesn't see the mother ever, doesn't get the smells and the looks and the nurturing and even the microbiome of the mother. So you can become different. And I'd become kind of a spaceship in my own world.
And so that spaceship ness probably allowed me to take the perspective on endotripping. So the irony was that, in a sense, the wound or the trauma, that it was going to be hard to relive this or rework this without some kind of assistance, gave me the capacity to use these medicines in a new way. And one night, within the first session of ayahuasca and the peruvian Amazon, it happened. I was able to sort of rebirth myself, to go back into my embryonic self and birth it, and cut the umbilical cord, if you will.
[00:26:44] Speaker B: If I may interrupt. I mean, this excites me very much, because it's almost as though the ayahuasca, in that loving, compassionate way that it can be, it's almost as though the ayahuasca entered into a partnership with you and basically said you had a very rough. Your biological birth was very rough. That made you. That left you damaged.
And you wrote very beautifully in your essay about this knot that you carried in your stomach for so long. And it was almost as if the ayahuasca says, okay, let's run this again. Let's redo that scenario. I'll help you through this birth trauma. We'll do it together, and we'll reborn Bruce Dahmer reborn, help you become reborn in a way that is healing and get rid of all that.
Is that an accurate way to think of it? Because that's how it reads to me in your essay that ayahuasca gave you the opportunity to go back and run this scenario again, the birth scenario. And you came out a whole healed person from that process which you were not before.
[00:28:08] Speaker A: Yes, yes, and yes.
And, in fact, I remember one moment on the second night of attempting the rebirth. The first night, I couldn't do it. I just couldn't do. It was whatever it was painful or hard to move. I was the embryo inside of me. And on the second night, I went back to it again, and our shaman came over and. Cause he could. They can, of course, sense when you're really trying to do the work. Weyher was like this, too. Yeah, yeah. And. And so then they get involved, and suddenly I realize he's, you know, pulled my shirt open, and he's blowing mapacho smoke down the shirt. And he is. He is doing everything he can from above. And together we did it together. Out came this sort of gelatinous mass that was me that had never left my mother's womb. And I remember bending over. This may sound very strange to listeners with my teeth, to cut the umbilical cord to make sure it was fully separated.
And then there was this whole process, for hours after that, of looking for it, paying attention to it as it grew. Because it was initially a baby that needed to be fed milk. You know, here I'm a man, but I do have the capacity, as all humans do, to nurture. So I was feeding it the milk of attention and kindness and love.
And if my attention wandered as it does, there'd be separation from this being. And I would panic, almost like a mother when the child has gone missing.
And then I would find it again. And so this was a training, like, don't lose the attention on this very delicate inner part of you that you're now trying to resource and help. You have to give it 100%. You have to be 100% present. Don't dissociate and you know, we're both sort of spectrum y people so we're always dissociating. But it was a training about emotional and hyper clear being together that I hadn't done before with any being, let alone the being. That was me.
Hours and hours later it had grown up into a boy and we went out into the rainforest together. There was literally this sense of this boy that now could be shown the world and there was even some pushback from the boy as I was trying to give the boy some guidance about how to live or how to live differently than I did. And there was even a sense of pushback. So there was almost like a co creation going on. It felt that real that night.
[00:31:08] Speaker B: That's amazing. I mean thats amazing.
You gave birth to yourself, to the new self. And Im reminded a little bit, actually Im reminded quite a bit of what we were trying to do at La Terra, Terence and I when we were going through something similar. The whole exercise was about generating a new being through doing this singing and to the mushroom. And we had this notion that we were transforming our DNA and all of that which people could read about. I don't want to go into the details, but it was a similar thing. It was a process of self rebirth, self transformation.
And I guess that is what the psychedelic experience does for people in its most profound expressions. So you benefit. I am somewhat surprised having gone through that and having gone through this tremendous self healing process.
Yet, you know, if anyone was in a position to become a healer because you'd had all these experiences pre psychedelic and then psychedelic, but you haven't taken on the mantle of being a shaman or healing people. Instead you've directed a lot of this toward developing your imagination and linking that to some pretty hard scientific areas.
Did you ever feel the impulse that I've cured myself, I've healed myself, I want to heal other people? Or was that a thread in your discoveries or not?
[00:33:09] Speaker A: It actually Dennis, it became a thread for a while. Yeah, I realized that the kind of attunement that it was able to bring to my little parts, you know, if we're talking about internal family systems, type work would allow me to attune to others. So for several years I was part of a group of 100 people that met four times a year and we did this type of work without medicines, without any. Any psychedelics. And it was tremendous. It was an absolutely tremendous practice. I called it the human medicine.
And so there was a, in a sense, a group field that was set up by so many people all having the intention on, say, working with one type of trauma for that weekend, and you could attune to someone and actually kind of like a shaman does attune to the processes within the little sub personalities or the one where the pain is concentrated or where the nausea is about to happen. And I found that I could do that. And, in fact, when we were with Wyra at will, Katika, one night, he actually looked over at me and he gestured for me to come over and he said, I need your help. And so for that entire night, he was actually not feeling well at all.
He had me to kind of work with him.
So I went around the room and I did what he would do, which is to sense where someone is, send them some, send them almost a permission or a pulse, and notice how then their system opened up and then the work that was coming out. I could do what Weyra was doing later on. We talked about it the next day. I knew when someone was going to purge, usually about ten or 15 seconds before.
And he told me, yeah, that he knows when someone's about La Portuga is happening. And what do you do? How do you hold that? How do you position your body to receive that, to acknowledge that? And we had quite a connection through this. And so, in a way, it was him showing me the way to do this work. And it's really.
It's deep empathy, and it's not trying to do something. The one thing I learned in this group over four or five years of doing this, was you become more of an open vessel, like an empty vessel that's inviting. Instead of reaching into someone's system, trying to grab hold of something you might be able to see or feel. You don't do that because they can close down. So you open your system and allow them to reach out. And in curiosity, some part of them reaches into your system, then you start to feel it. You can put a voice to it, you can do an action, you can hear something, because you become what the Buddhists call an open cup.
And I kind of put two and two together. That the shamanic work and this work that I've been doing for all these years, it was very buddhist Sokchan focused, was the same thing in that it was open cup and listening.
And, you know, it's not you. Something's coming in your system and a memory will show up, or a sensed feeling will show up. It's actually from the other person.
And just by touching it slightly, it allows it to. It permisses it to come out and get stronger, and a person might go through a cathartic release because that part of them was touched or seen.
So that's how this sort of all crossed over.
And I decided after a while that I could always do that kind of work. And I still love that kind of work. And it comes up now and then, but with my training in the way that I am, there are many, many healers on. On the earth that can do the same kind of work. I thought, you know, the best way for me to apply myself is on this big question that I took up when I was 14 years old.
[00:37:33] Speaker B: Right?
[00:37:34] Speaker A: And then I felt that by discovering maybe an answer to the mystery of how life began, it would be almost like a group role would be a healing piece of information that would be transformative for humanity to see and even recreate the process that led to living cells. It would be as powerful as, say, seeing the earth from space on Apollo eight all those years ago. It would be that type of transformative thing to watch the deepest ancestors come into being in a cycling little petri dish.
[00:38:14] Speaker B: So, yes, so I see you wanted to expand it so that you could bring these skills to all of humanity and really all of the biosphere. I think it's very interesting. You spoke to me a little bit about when we were with Wira, and he asked you to help him, but you'd ever elaborated on that, you know, and what I am getting from this conversation is that weird could tell you and he were on the same wavelength in that session, the rest of us weren't. I mean, I tend to go inside and I do my own thing. I wasn't even aware of what was going on, and that's what I do. But weird consents. He needed some help.
He said, bruce, bruce has the tools. He has the awareness. He can do it. So he enlisted you on the spot because he can tell that you were on the same wavelength, that you were a fellow healer.
And that's really amazing. Of course, weird was an incredible curandero as well. So that's just interesting to me that. That you took this role, and Weiro was happy to have you helping him because he could see that you got it and you have expanded.
You've taken these tools, the psychedelic tools, the endo tripping, the endowska technology and all that, and you've used that, you've applied it to scientific conundrums. The big questions, how did life get here? Which is really as fundamental as asking, why are we here?
I don't know if there's an answer to why we're here. Maybe eventually we'll discover. But we can ask the question, how did we get here?
And that's what you have been investigating. How did life arise on Earth? So there's so much I'd like to ask you about that aspect, which is more theoretical and maybe less personal. But I'm just curious, what is your view? What do you think?
I guess one way to approach this is, how common do you think life is in the universe?
Are we alone, or are we mostly alone? Or is the universe permeated with life? What's your intuition and understanding about that?
[00:41:03] Speaker A: My intuition these days is microbes may be hard, not easy. So we think of when we work with our colleagues in astrobiology who study exoplanets. So they're looking at all these worlds around other solar systems that may or may not have water. They might have water vapor in their atmospheres, might be indicative of water on the surface, and then they might say, well, these are in the habitable zones of their solar systems, so life might be there. But that's it. That's as far as the science had gotten. What Dave Deemer and I did, starting in 2009, when we got together at UC Santa Cruz, was, we said, we're going to actually put a box, an experimental box, around this and investigate actually where life could start. Because for 100 years, there have been these approaches. And one of them was lightning in the atmosphere, the famous Miller Urey experiment flask that created the amino acids. This brown deposits on the flask in the 1950s. And then 1977, submersible Alvin discovered these mid atlantic bridge, or even in the Pacific, hydrothermal black and white smokers coming out of the sea floor. And in the early eighties, it was suggested, well, you know, there should be all kinds of different redox couples and chemistry and things going on there. Maybe life started there and then spread to the land from the sea. And that had been the prevailing thought since recon, the late eighties.
But it's never panned out. And finally, and it's never panned out in that the proposal was if you have CO2 and hydrogen sources, that somehow in these hot channels of water that might have different ph in the hot part of the water than in the cold seawater or within little mineral pockets, you can set up disequilibria, or where things can get pushed forward chemically.
And the problem that they always had is you can't test this down in the ocean. All your reagents would just simply be lost, which was an early indication of there being a really big problem with this. So groups at many places, like University College London, at jet propulsion lab Caltech, built these pressure vessels where they would grow what they called chemical gardens, these little chimneys, and would introduce something, and it would sort of flow through, and they might get the slight traces of something like formic acid, for example. But formic acid is a long way from where you want to get, which is nucleotides, the building blocks of rna and DNA and amino acids. That's a long way.
[00:44:01] Speaker B: Right?
[00:44:02] Speaker A: And the chemists started pushing back. So the geochemists obviously loved this idea that the chemists started pushing back. And around 2015, debates erupted in the New York Times, of all places, and in nature. Nature, the science magazine, and the chemists basically were saying, how can this actually work? Because there's water always present. So if you get a more complex molecule, like a polymer, like a set of chain links, the water is just going to break it down.
Life, you don't dissolve in the shower because you have enzymes to reconstruct your polymers as they break down in your cells until they can't do it anymore. And then you die. Actually, that's a good definition for death. You just get dissolved.
[00:44:54] Speaker B: If there's no metabolism, there's no life, right?
[00:44:58] Speaker A: There's no life. So all of this was just getting ready to burst because of the more and more elaborate proposals of who we call the ventists, the believers in the hydrothermal. They kept getting more elaborated, proposing things that actually would never be found in a hydrothermal vent.
And Dave and I came up with an alternative hypothesis, which was hot springs. If we go to a hot spring. We actually read Charles Darwin's letter to JD Hooker of 1871. He nails it in this letter where Hooker must have asked him, where did you think life began in the first place? Because Darwin had written and published origin of species, a descent of man, and these amazing ideas about evolution by natural selection, but never really took up the question of life's beginning. And so he wrote in this letter to Hooker, I think it could have started in a warm little pond somewhere, where there are all sorts of phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, et cetera, such that a protein compound formed, ready to undergo more complex changes.
So he actually nailed it in 1871, which is like over 150 years ago, that you need to form these long chains of things, in that case, proteins. The Victorians knew about proteins, chains of amino acids, and that they could get more complex through future cycles.
And that's totally, absolutely, brilliantly prescient. And that the pond had to be warm for more activation energy. And it turns out that Charles Darwin, as a young man, he went to the Galapagos Islands. And I went there myself about six or seven years ago. He saw the finches on their beak.
Finches changed over very short periods of time. They had adapted. If he had gone to a different island, he would have seen hot springs, volcanic environments, and he never did in that entire trip. So what Dave and I did is took Darwin's old idea and said, how do you make protein compounds form and get more complex? Well, it's wet, dry cycling.
So if you wet the surface of one of these little ponds. And you could say that it would happen best in a hot spring through geysers that fill the pond. And then it dries down, or even a splashing that happens, or even steam that makes a sheen on rock that suddenly then dries down. If you have present amino acids or nucleotides, the building blocks of the biopolymers of life. And if you are also lucky to have lipid, the membrane forming fatty acids, which are all available coming in from space. In fact, I have some of it right here in this little vial from the Murchison meteorite. And if I smell it, I give it a sniff. It's got this incredible smoky smell and that little.
[00:48:11] Speaker B: Wish I could take a virtual sniff, but can you actually smell something?
[00:48:15] Speaker A: Does this have.
[00:48:17] Speaker B: So what you're organic aroma.
[00:48:20] Speaker A: It has an organic aroma. So this material, let's hold it as close as I can. Is older than Earth. It's from a parent body of an asteroid. That bit of it broke off. It's selling to Australia in 1969. It's called the Murchison meteorite. And it's full of carbonaceous compounds. And it.
[00:48:41] Speaker B: Quite a famous meteorite. Yeah, yeah.
[00:48:45] Speaker A: And it smells smoky. And it's basically polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons mixed in with all kinds of things. And when this vial had some little buffer, acidic buffer in it, we could see membranes forming in there. And there are like 70 amino acids were discovered in here.
So 70 made in space. Not made by life in space, but made by the natural processes. And two recent space missions, the japanese and the american mission, brought back oodles of this stuff from asteroids in situ.
[00:49:24] Speaker B: So the thinking is that in the early protobiosphere, there must have been constant, pretty much tremendous and constant asteroid falls. Right. Meteor impacts. And many of these were carbonaceous, not all of them, but it was not uncommon at all.
[00:49:48] Speaker A: And copious amounts of dust particles, too.
So in the night sky, 4 billion years ago, if you had your environment suit on and you're on some volcanic landscape crunching along, you'd look up and you'd see this shining disk around the entire sun, this glowing Saturn like rings, and that's the formation disk of the solar system. You can actually still see it today.
Is it called zodiacal azimuthal light?
[00:50:17] Speaker B: Zodiacal light, yes, zodiacal light.
[00:50:19] Speaker A: So that is the formation dust disk of the early solar system.
[00:50:26] Speaker B: So why did, I mean, so we're back to the warm little pond hypothesis, which Darwin identified 170 years ago as the most likely place. Why did science reject that and go with this vent hypothesis, which clearly has lots of problems, not least being that polymers cannot hang together in these high acidic environments? Why did science abandon the warm little pond and go for this other approach, which has turned out to be, if you'll pardon the pond, a dry hole?
[00:51:08] Speaker A: I think science does this science. So when Miller and Urey sparked the chamber and made these important organics, suddenly everybody and all their graduate students were sparking chambers. So from the fifties and the sixties, there were just more and more repeats of Miller and Urey, but there was no actual model for how did this actually get to living cells? And it wasn't. It, it literally took a visionary named Dave Deemer, working with his colleagues, that say, look, you need compartments. It's no good just to have solution chemistry generating a wafer of equilibrium reaction that makes a bunch of products, and that's the end of the day. You actually need to compartmentalize things in cell size compartments which are permeable, semi permeable. You need to have something like the building blocks of life, or what are called now protocells, and therefore membranes are part of the story. So then the field kind of fractured it sort of like, well, there was the lipid world and then the rna world hypothesis, and then replicators first, or metabolism first. So because scientists get into a kind of reductionist mindset, they're like, well, our lab will work on the metabolism first and establish a beachhead there. And another lab might say, well, we're working on the rna world and ribozyme replicators, boom, that's all we do. And yet what you really need is this big picture thinking. And none of the colleagues were ever leaving their laboratories and going out into natural environments where nature would teach them and basically sock them in, in the jaw, actually.
And so Dave started to do this in the eighties, and he went to bumpus, hell of all places. And this is a place where Mister Bumpus lost his leg falling into hot mud right up here at Mount Lassen Volcanic park. And so days started crunching through the snow, and he actually fell through at one point in the winter. It was all alone. He could have lost his foot easily in these fumarolic hot spring fields. And so then he said, we've got to go try this. In the actual environment that we think provided the energy and the minerals and the nutrients and collected stuff from there is falling in and could also cycle. We have to go and do it. He was the only one doing it. And then we started to collaborate around 2009, and we went to, gosh, Bumpus Hill, and we went to Yellowstone National park to form protocells for the first time in situ. And then we started going to New Zealand, and we went to Rotorua and did two years of experiments repeating with our colleagues there. And we also went to Australia, where we went to literally put our hands on the oldest rocks that have evidence for life on earth, and that's in the Pilbara, northwest Australia. And these are called stromatolites. And we went with geologists to literally crunching through these landscapes up to a rock outcrop with your estwing rock hammer, which is the last thing our colleagues in origin of life would have ever done, and bash off a little spalling of a rock in a little vein that has sort of black and white flecks in it. And what our colleagues said that is evidence for a hot spring three and a half billion years ago. And if you bash a piece of it off and we come and we thin section, do a thousand thin sections, what we found was evidence for microbes and evidence for little spherules, which would have been oxygenic, some sort of oxygenic metabolism, three and a half billion years as far back as we've been ever able to look. So what they actually then demonstrated in the rock record, not in the laboratory doing a simple chemical experiment, was that life existed on land as far back as we can look, and it was thriving in hot springs. So that was a big sign pointing back that hot springs may be the place where it was born and adapted to lakes and streams in the oceans later. But the hot spring was place that had the chemical, the chemical wound to actually bring life into being. So all of this was happening 2015 1617. We formed protocells in the hot springs in New Zealand in 2020. We replicated just before COVID broke out. And we could see the glowing contents of rna self assembled and DNA self assembled inside these vesicles by wetting and drying with the hot spring water in the environment, forming these things, and published our hypothesis in the spring of 2020, the fully worked out hypothesis. And now it's cited almost daily somewhere in nature.
[00:56:29] Speaker B: Right. You published your hypothesis in Nature.
[00:56:32] Speaker A: It was published in Astrobiology journal Astrobiology.
[00:56:37] Speaker B: Well, this is, so this is kind of an object lesson for scientists, which I think the message is, get out of the lab once in a while, take a look at nature, look around and see whats going on, and you might learn something. So you did that and you saw all these incredible processes. Ive said much the same to my botanist and plant science colleagues, who are very preoccupied with molecular processes and this sort of thing. You know, take the afternoon off and go look at an ecosystem and watch what's going on in the ecosystem, because that's a distributed intelligence as well. And there are incredible processes going on.
So this leads me to my next question. It appears that given the right initial circumstances, the warm, salty pond and the right circumstances, that you get these self replicating, self synthesizing processes going on. The membranes form, eventually you get cells that, to all intents and purposes, they are living.
It's possible to speculate that in many environments throughout the solar system and the cosmos, you get similar kinds of processes. So is it reasonable to say that the first step from non life to microbial life is probably easy given the right circumstances, you're going to get microbes. Microbes are probably quite common in planetary ecosystems in many places. As long as circumstances are right, how do you transition from there to complex life and conscious life?
What kicks it to the next stage?
And I think that my own bias, certainly not being an expert on any of this, but I'm thinking microbial life may be very common, you know, in the scheme of thing, and complex and intelligent life might still be extremely rare.
[00:59:07] Speaker A: What can, I would tend to agree. And here's. So this is back to your original question of 15 minutes ago or so. Microbes actually may be hard, because now if we have a box around what it takes to make living microbes, let's actually work backwards. And this will actually go back to my ayahuasca download, which we'll bring back in, because Dave and I had reached a point around 2012 or 13 where we had all this stuff together, but we couldn't see beyond it. It was just too multivariate, there was too much going on.
You couldn't sort of draw it on paper in a linear fashion. You couldn't even redo computer simulations to any effect because there were so many things involved, membranes and energy flowing in and stuff coming in across the membranes, and messy chemistry going on. And then the wet, dry cycling would squeeze everything down to a dried film, and then it would bud off. When you're rehydrated and you get these trillions of compartments that you could do on your stovetop in your kitchen, actually. Right? So we were at this stopping point, and I was sort of banging my head on the wall. And during the ayahuasca session in 2013, this was October 2013, I was shown a new way to think about it. And this had actually just. I coined a phrase for this. First the healing, then the revealing.
And this night in 2013 was a ten minute segment where Mama aya, she's an embodied saying, showed me my conception, not just my birth, but the conception, sperm to egg in my parents. And that when they gave me up, they decided to give me up while I was still an embryo.
But I was in the belly of my mother and for a few moments felt her love. And that was the most healing moment of my existence.
And so that was a complete clearing of that little knot in my belly at that point. And so because I had taken a very small dose of Aya and done this attunement, not only the observer crystal sphere, but a lot of other attunements, then I felt more capacity because to that I had brought my own endotripping. So because I had downdosed so much over a couple of years, I just. I found a sweet spot in which I felt safe to power up my endotripping machinery and bring it online. And so as I turned to Mama Aya and I said, thank you. Or revealing this, my creation story, would you like to go back and investigate or try to find the verse of us all?
The origin of life scientifically worked out, and there was a kind of nod of acquiescence, and we merged into one thing. I developed a practice with her. There's sort of a sense of an external entity that's guiding or confusing or dominating or something, but there's a moment of which you just merge into one thing, and there's sort of a shaking, and then you're one. So there isn't a dual thing. You now one, you're totally joined together, and you travel together. So that's what happened after years of Ayahuasca practice, was becoming, in a sense, the unified.
And so then I started pulling endotrips off the shelf that I'd done previously, going back through all lines of sperm, back through the bodies of humans into prosimian bodies, into tetrapod bodies, into scaly fish bodies.
And I started running life in reverse all the way back through the cloud of microbiota. It was a 3 billion year monster cloud while monitoring my brain temperature. Cause I knew that I was running this endotrips so damn hard that I could kind of blow it in a way. It could blow a fuse box. And then the full endotrips started. So I was completely taken over. I was now on the crunchy landscape 4.1 billion years ago. I'd landed near a hot spring pool, and I was about to enter that pool. And then the entire thing downloaded. The answer came. Become it. It's always the same answer when you ask. And this isn't Mama Aya I'm talking to. I'm talking to something bigger, because Mama and Ayan are one thing on an inquiry.
And this one big thing, whatever the big thing is, the big teacher or the big projectionist or whatever it is said, become it, become a protocell. And there was one in front of me that was just full of neon colors.
It had already, through natural selection processes, become more alive. So there were lifelike things going on inside it, but it wasn't yet alive. And I died. I passed out and was reborn as that protocell. And as I was being born as that protocell, I screamed. I came back to consciousness in a scream. At the same time as I was screaming, the light turned on and I watched a piece of the protocell tear itself away. And there was a piece. It was like the scream was from the piece, but the piece was black inside and dead. And then my observer swung and saw polymers dancing like they were being run by piano keys, by a hand on a piano.
There was one thing, and suddenly I was more alive.
And this insight is a stunning insight.
And it was done as a perfect marriage between endotrip inputs or visioning. And in a sense that if it's dimethyltryptamine being produced endogenously, meeting the Maoi from a very small dose of aya plus the, the DMT from that source created this absolute perfect medium. And then the set and setting the question, the inquiry, the readiness. And I watched the process of a protocell attempting to do a division into two and failing, and yet something was happening. And the protocell that was attempting the division didn't die as a result.
And that created the riddle, which three months later, a full endo trip took me over about three months later, where I saw the entire answer roll out, the entire scenario from all the polymeric evolution polymers, coupling between wet and dry and going into layers and then getting budded out and all the selection working on them all the way to the point of protocell division, which is a lot of machinery, if you're going to divide a protocell into two viable now living cells, that's a freaking huge amount of timing and controls and stuff has to have grown in the right place and ends up in the right, attached to the right membrane in the right spot to do the thing, the transition to life, which is to reproduce rather than being budded or in this kind of pre life reproduction, to go to living lineal descent of genes like identity, cellular identity emerged. And it was the entire thing happened because of this question where I was shown, you're looking at it from the wrong perspective, you're looking at it from individual reactions at the beginning. You need to study it at the very end, at the very effort, at the moment when protocells are attempting division and work backwards.
And how did they get to that nadir, that Phoenix point?
And that led to pages of notes and drawings which I then sent off to Dave, and Dave said, you found it. You found the kinetic trap that allows this to actually happen.
And it's continued to unroll. I mean, the vision between the Peru peruvian ayavision and then the endotrip vision, both of which I recorded in my, like, endo holographic recorder, are still generating stuff. There's still stuff in there, you know, ten years later. But that unrolled into a hypothesis, paper experimental work around the world, and then a challenge to the hydrothermal vent community. And then team after team after team, taking up wet dry cycling, finding that it actually worked, and you could form more complex things and you could compartmentalize them. And then the whole protocell experimental science was born, field work started. We're actually heading back to, we're heading to Iceland in July to do things in Iceland.
[01:08:39] Speaker B: Good time visit Iceland since the volcanoes, very active, right?
[01:08:44] Speaker A: We're gonna, we're actually gonna, we're gonna crunch around Iceland and characterize every little warm pond we can find, because we now are gonna do a map of all types of warm little ponds that might exist in the universe on, in a planet that has subaerial landscapes and volcanism. And that's where we think life can begin. Herbal worlds. And NASA actually brought me into a team for landing site selection for the Mars 2020 rover, which is currently on the surface. So we actually, they used the hot spring hypothesis is what it's called for the listeners to help decide on choosing landing sites. So it's actually, it's come this far and yet there's so much more to do. There's so much more.
In fact, there was a paper published this morning by Francesca Carey, our graduate student, called Origin of Life on Mars. Or can life start on Mars protocell experiments using Mars level iron. She did her master's degree in that, and her paper finally got published after two months of peer review.
And she's introduced yours, or it's her master's thesis, but it's a paper in a really good journal, and she's using a new terminology that Dave came up with, which is her ability.
So habitable worlds are ones that might have support life as we know it. They have liquid water. Herbal worlds can start life, and those are different conditions.
A frozen ice world with an ocean beneath an ice shell like the moons of Saturn probably can't start life. And now it's rolling through the field of astrobiology that wet dry cycling may be required to be in life. And that actually puts a box around the places life can start. And what I would suggest in this long winded answer to your very short question is that microbes may be harder than we know. Because getting all the way up to the point where microbes do that trick, there are many points of failure before that, right? The entire colony can get wiped out. And that has to be happening across an entire landscape where you have many pools and blowing around by wind. The dry films will blow by wind or they'll be washed. So you have protocell colonies everywhere in exchange, just like life today.
And yet it's still such a long march all the way to the point of a viable living cell. I would suggest it is as hard a transition as single celled to, say, eukaryotic cells with organelles, and it's as hard a transition as organelle oxygen breeding, breathing eukaryotes to. To multicellularity. I think it's microbes are hard, not easy. So what we've been doing with SETI institute is taking Frank Drake's equation, which estimates the number of civilizations that have developed technology we might detect, and his f sub l term is the proportion of worlds where life can start.
We're actually putting a box around that and saying, here are the conditions. Let's take 10,000 exoplanets and models of exoplanets and apply the conditions that we need. Wet dry cycling. We need exposure to the atmosphere. We need extended periods of time of prebiotic evolution, a combinatorial selection, we call it, to get to microbes. And then most of those worlds die. So Mars pretty much by 3.5 billion years ago, or 3 billion years, it lost all its surface water. Its atmosphere was stripped away. And the only microbes well find there are in the rock and hot, wet rock. And so theres no future path toward multicellular bigger organisms on Mars. So Mars is done. Venus is baked. You know, Venus is done. So possibly the majority of worlds are not herable, or if they are herable, theyre herable for limited timeframes, then they go out of habitability. Even so, planets are not stable platforms. So it may be that if microbes are hard, planets die, basically become sterilizing environments, then getting to multicellularity is orders of magnitude harder than we possibly can know.
[01:13:35] Speaker B: So what I'm hearing is the take home lesson here. Every stage is hard.
You could have these self replicating systems, but then for them to bud off and rep, they may be working as a system, but then to bud off and replicate, that's hard because the bud may be devoid of some of the machinery that's needed for it to function. On the other hand, you have trillions and trillions of instances of this going on in a particular environment. So I'm not reassured. Bruce, I was hoping you would tell me that it's pretty assured that microbial life is common, you're saying? Not at all. You can't be sure of that. That may be as rare.
And of course, it's got to start somewhere. So if microbial life is actually rare, that means multicellular life is probably rare. And complex systems thinking, systems consciousness and all that depends on these very complex organic substrates are, again, probably extremely rare because every level is a threshold that is difficult to get over, you know, from the protocell to multiple protocells to then agglomeration into multiple cellular systems and then onto complexity. There are so many, you know, so many things can go wrong at so many different stages.
So then that leads to the, and yet here we are, right here we are. So on at least one planet, this has happened, and here's rare, is it that a planet will have life to the level of complexity that we have? You can begin to have some intelligent suppositions about that. What's your feeling?
[01:15:57] Speaker A: There are ways to test it. So, for example, if Mars meteorites are found, say, on the south pole ice cap, which they have been, you go through them and you find actual living microbes or even sort of the fossil, chemical, fossil remnants then you've got a little piece of what could be a second start for life on Mars. That just got to a certain point. If we go to Mars and we're able to drill and pull some bugs up and see whether they have the same. And send the samples back, see if they have the same genetic code, they have a different genetic code. We know that life had started on two herbal worlds, earth and Mars, in separate times. If they have the same genetic code as us, we might be Martians. Mars might have started microbial life, and it might have been seeded here.
[01:16:47] Speaker B: It's seeded here? Yeah. What does it.
[01:16:51] Speaker A: Well, I still think that earth is very rare. So Ward and Brownlee wrote this wonderful book in 1999 called Rare Earth, and they started to pull all the factors together that would lead to a world that could maintain liquid water on its surface for 4 billion years is extremely rare.
Oceans and lakes and things like just don't hang around on planets. And we know that even more clearly now. Our solar system is rare. The way that we have circular orbits of giant cold gas planets here that have kept the asteroid belt out a little bit, and we have the circular orbits of these terrestrial type worlds on the inner side as a rare configuration. So all this is like looking. And we have a big moon. The moon may have made all the difference, and the moon is an accidental collision.
So it goes on and on and on. And you need fresh water. Not salty. If you have salt water, only the membranes, like what I did in Yellowstone, was put this membrane material that would have come from asteroids into silicious and acidic buffers, like pulled out of the hot springs in Yellowstone, and it formed this little milky substance, which was protocell compartments or vesicles. And then Dave took seawater from Santa Cruz here, and it crashes all that. So seawater destroys the ability of these lipids to form these compartments. So you can't have salt water. Salt water. So, on Mars, if Mars was drying out, even at 4 billion years ago and the surface water was mostly salty, it's a block to starting life at all in this model. So all of this leads you to the realization we may be extraordinarily rare. And toward the end of my time with ayahuasca, this is 2016. It's literally my last time in Peru. This is after we were at Boca Tico. I went back one more time to the Amazon, and I ran the model again in the space. We, in a sense, mama and I were doing our last dance. We were winding it up, and I brought the model and ran it as an endotrip.
And I asked Mama, I, and I've never actually told anybody this, so this is, it's not even in the, in the essay that I sent you today. But I asked her, have we found the ancestors?
And this voice came, or this sort of presence?
Yes, you have found the ancestors. And look.
And what then came? I was thrown into another endo trip where there was a bubbling pool of almost gray like water, where globules were sort of coming up and going down, coming up and going down. And I realized this is sped up a million times.
And what I'm being shown is the power of life.
And then the voice came. See how powerful life is when it gets a hold?
It will transform a world.
It has the power to transform a world. And one of the insights from that and later things was, it's not about protocells duking it out for limited resources, it's actually about protocells in agglomerations, they're communal. And in fact, protocells couldn't have learned to divide on their own, floating around, because that one that I was, if it was floating in solution, it was budding off bits of itself, and it made. It had a failure, it would have lost all the contents. It's too risky. So one of the lessons from, from that vision was that protocells only do things in a network, they do things in a communal complex.
[01:20:59] Speaker B: Symbiosis, baby. Yes, from the very earliest moments of life. Exception.
[01:21:07] Speaker A: It's the origin. And so that Margolis idea of endosymbiosis is primordial, and therefore you cannot see life through the strict darwinian Herbert Spencerian competition in tooth red and tooth and claw, because the substratum of all of life is a deeply Internet worked microbial world that's below our feet, it is in our guts, it is coating our skins, it is floating in the air, and it's deeply symbiotic and it's deeply networked. And that odd sort of parasitic beings like us, that we can't make our own food, so we eat other things arise out of, by the grace of this incredible symbiotic network, which is basically the microbial mat grown up the trees that are outside the root systems, mycelia, everything. And so that the planet Earth is what Carl woese called a progenote, the communal, amorphous sharing, horizontally gene sharing mat unit that led to the transition to life. So he called that the progenote. And we've taken that term into our science and said, there's a progenote prerogative, which is everything is shared horizontally, everything helps repair other parts of it, because it's the health of the protocell mass that matters first, because there isn't actually any tools for competition except for the little wiggle of potentially viruses coming in early on. And then you get molecular competition. So it's a new lens through which to see life itself as a deeply communal, interrelated, almost market economy.
And that's actually how life rolls. It's maybe not how some root humans roll, but we live in symbiotic cities and we get products off of buy them from Amazon, which is almost like a mycelial structure.
So what we're hoping with this new origin of life philosophy, if you will, and I'm starting to work with whiteheadian philosophers and spiritual thinkers, and bringing this, in a sense, is a kind of good news about how we were born into the culture to kind of wake us up. This is how we were made. And they were little flimsy things that barely made it kind of a thing, but they were powerful because can you imagine? You have a volcanic island, you have the transition to microbiota in one region of the island, which is subject to impacts and tsunamis and everything, and it's just starting to spread. And you look at the entire earth, and that, that little slick, that slurry, the silvery slurry of those things, eventually transforms everything about the earth. It's atmosphere, the chemistry of its oceans, utterly. It invents new geology, you know, and it's so powerful. So when life does get started, if it has a shot which planets don't often offer, planets don't offer pathways forward because they die, they just go out of habitability, they become sterilizing to life, or you have to go into refuges. If the planet stays around long enough for life to start managing the temperature, for example, and atmospheric composition, which is what lovelock calls Gaia, then you have a shot at complex organisms.
But I think it's vanishingly rare. But when it gets going, it's really potent.
So I don't know if that's a.
[01:25:06] Speaker B: Yeah, so that's amazing.
So life is in fact probably extremely rare, but once it takes hold someplace, as it has on our planet, then it takes the controls, in a sense, it will ensure its persistence because it will modify planetary geochemistry and all of this to ensure that. So thats the essence of the Gaia hypothesis.
We have one instance, we have an n of one. We cant say anything about other planets. We can say things about the conditions on other planets, but this is the only one we know for sure that it's worked. And there are so many opportunities for life to, you know, if these agglomerations of different protocells do not happen, if the chemical conditions change, so it's a sterilizing environment at all of these different junctures, then it can wipe life out.
And I would say, and we've achieved. Now we're 4 billion years on and the world is covered in life, and this very problematic organism has appeared. And you can't even say at this point that, that the persistence of life on earth is assured because we may be the factor that actually puts it to an end, unfortunately. So life, even though it's achieved incredible complexity and even what we choose to call intelligence, although sometimes there's not much evidence of that, but it means that it's a continuous struggle. And I think in some ways, the big take home lesson for this is that earth is fragile. Earth may be the only one and we need to take care of it as much as we can, or if not take care of it, at least let it take care of itself, which it will do. But in some ways, to my mind, it's not reassuring to think that life may be so rare in the universe, you know, I mean, and we may be the only one, although that seems unlikely too, because, you know, it seems unlikely, but. But what you're telling me is it probably is extremely rare.
[01:27:54] Speaker A: So if, if we, you know, there of course, could be complex life out there that just doesnt seek to travel or reach out and use radio and things like that. So if were alone, for all intents and purposes, in our little sector here, we have a really deep responsibility to that which created us this beautiful world, because humans are, as a result of the sacrifices of so many lines of organism and ecosystems and the giving up. And just like you have done, and both of us have done, we stood in front of the lacuma tree at Wilkatika late at night and conferred with the tree. It's a thousand years old. I think it was planted by pre incan people. This an extraordinary tree.
And several times I talked with it and I asked it one night about us.
And there was a truck, this was about five in the morning, and there was a truck on the Elonte Tombo highway that was delivering gasoline or something like that. It's a poor quechua guy trying to earn a few soles for his family. And you could hear this truck go by. It was the first truck of the day. And the lucuma said, sort of almost visibly flinched, and you could feel a consciousness going, saying, that is the sound that is eating the world.
That is what is eating the world. And I felt kind of down as a result, and asked her, you know, if this tree is an embodied entity, what do you think about all of it? And she turned to me and she said, you are my most beautiful creation, and we are bringing to you our most powerful tools.
First, we brought to bring you to consciousness and to transform you. First we brought you alcohols and sugars and carbohydrates. Then we brought you stimulants like caffeine. And now we're putting inside of you our best alchemy, you know, ayahuasca and the others, to tune you, to train you, to attune you to who you are and to what this is and what we are, and to bring you into the sense of knowing where to take us all next. Because you are the stewards now. You know, in a sense, mama Gaia is no longer running the show because it's happening too fast for nature to adjust and adapt.
It's in your hands. And you are beautiful. You are a magnificent creation. And so that, for me, summed it up or encapsulated it, and what I realized now, even today, as we form minds, what we're doing is we're saying these tools aren't just for healing, they're also for revealing. So, for example, the revealing from the lukuma, using wire's ayahuasca as the lever or the catalyst, was a powerful, transforming experience for me, as it has been for you.
That has the power to realign human beings into new ways of being, new objectives in our lives, new ways of living, seeing each other, working with each other, how we do our enterprises, how we invent our technology.
And all of this is coming into our bloodstreams, just as I think the power of endotripping is coming online, much stronger for humans, the young ones that we see out there. The power of visionary download is because we're so connected by our devices, we're connected in a deeper mesh now than we've ever been connected. So we are the protocells in the experiment of dividing, and we are enmeshed by our technology.
And it's a hard birth, and there will be a lot of stillbirths, but it's all still biology. It's all still alive. Even our technology is biology. And so all of this is being sacrificed. Gaia, in a sense, is allowing us to take all the green if we will do the act of reproducing Gaia, if we'll give Gaia a path forward into the cosmos. And we may be able to do that because Earth is only 100 million years by the same James lovelock. We're 100 million years or so from the Venus Terminator, which will turn Earth into Venus. The heat curve of the sun. And so, beyond our effect of climate change, this is just a fact that the incident solar radiation is going to take Earth out of habitability in a very short period of time, in terms of geological time.
[01:33:07] Speaker B: So the plant terms of human time, given what we're doing with it, we may see Earth reach that point within our lifetime.
[01:33:17] Speaker A: And so with that, the intensity of the selection pressure is going to provide us enough stress to our systems where we're forced to adapt. And in these incredibly periods of selection and pressure, it's when species make major moves. So if the lessons of all of the origin of life and its evolution through 4 billion years of these massive impactors and barely making it, we're coming into one of these almost asteroid strike type environments that's super complex, but we're awake and aware, we have tools, and I really believe that we can push through. It will transform us. It will take some of us out of the gene pool, frankly. It's going to strip us down. It's going to challenge us to focus on that. That is important and that matters from the heart as well as the head. And why we started minds was to say, the plant medicines that you and I love so much should be taken into a whole new class of humans who aren't necessarily just seeking their own healing, although everyone needs some healing, they're trying to see the future, trying to see forward. They're trying to see the complexity of the earth. They're trying to create things from a healing, a healed heart perspective. When they do their invention and their startup, it's from that place. So minds is about the post therapeutic elixirs of the medicines, the elixir power, the magic power to manifest a different future, you know, for scientists and people who found companies and people who lead others and people who design amazing things. And. And so that's what came out of the talk at ESPD and all this amazing group has come together in Austin, Texas, and the nonprofit was formed, and we're going to be getting support for studies and a building community. So that's the spark of taking psychedelics into a whole new stratum of human beings just when we need it.
[01:35:35] Speaker B: Well, we certainly need it. That is.
I mean, all that you say is true. My concern is that this wisdom is there. The planet is teaching us this. It's there to learn from. But are enough people listening and not enough people are listening? This is what worries me. People like yourself. And the other brilliant people that you work with. They get it.
Most of the population of the earth is not. They don't get it. And moreover, they don't care. And that indifference.
The planet may die due to indifference.
And that's very depressing in some ways. And you touched on a topic which we may have to revisit at some point. But I think as much as I would like to believe. I don't think it's a solution to. I don't think we can become a space faring species.
Maybe in the near Earth environment within reach of the solar system. But I've been.
Been impressed and depressed by some of these studies I've read. Where people are simulating being on Mars for extended periods. They isolate themselves in these enclosed environments. In desert ecosystems and that sort of thing. To see what it's like.
It seems not enough people are thinking about this. I don't think the human species can do this.
You could isolate yourself on a planet for 800 days or two years. But everybody will be insane by the time that happens. What are you going to do about that? It seems like building some of the artificial.
Using asteroids to build artificial edens, as you've described in some of your technological scenarios. That essentially huge space colonies. That is a possibility. Colonizing Mars or any place like that seems to be like a non starter. I dont think it will work.
[01:38:05] Speaker A: Yeah. I would tend to agree that probably Mars and moon bases will be for science only because the environments are very, very harsh.
[01:38:16] Speaker B: Very harsh. And there's a part of a bind as well.
[01:38:21] Speaker A: A clue is in here. So the Murchison meteorite and its little effusions.
If we. This is a design that I came up with. With a SETI astronomer and a balloon designer. This is from ten years ago. But it's being now seriously considered by people smarter than us. In terms of designing spacecraft.
In a sense, going out to these carbonaceous asteroids. As we've done recently. These old bodies is going home.
So as we get close to them, they're kind of dark. And there's light patches. And they're covered with boulders that have sort of affixed themselves. But in there are possibly the building blocks of life. So what if you put a balloon around one of them, a small one, and it has some water ice in it, because it's far enough out so things haven't sort of boiled off from the sun.
Suddenly. You could turn that asteroid, it might be, you know, dozen meters across or something like that, into a small world. So out would come the water, and it would form this very, very small, sort of ultra thin, you call it ocean. The water vapor and various gases would fill the inside of the balloon, and there would be rocky interior that's now releasing amino acids and carboxylic acids. And it would be a very interesting science to do, because you would see what the primordial soup was made out of. So that that's actually a fairly easy mission to fly. You know, it could be done in ten years or something. But what if you then turned lights on on the interior and you inoculated that little world that was life, and.
[01:40:14] Speaker B: Put it into a greenhouse, right?
[01:40:16] Speaker A: Yeah. It's like a terrarium. It's like one of those glass globe terrariums. And suddenly, without having to terraform Mars or try to mine water ice from the moon, all these really difficult things, you could turn on a light and make a tiny version of Earth. And that tiny version of Earth could become quite biologically rich, and it would be an exemplar of a biosphere, or Dorian Sagan's idea, biospheres. And it would sort of wake us up to, well, now we can manage that as an aquarium or terrarium.
[01:40:55] Speaker B: So this is the planetary protocell, buddied off versions of itself. Little, tiny versions of itself. Little.
It's possible. This is, again, not just, it seems like this is the only way that we could develop an extra planetary sustained presence that might work. You have to develop the technology to go grab these asteroids and bring them closer to Earth. Right. Because what it would take to get out there, again, you're talking voyages of months or years to get in proximity of these things. But if you could somehow send a robot and get it to set the trajectory to make it insert into orbit either around the moon or around the earth, then you could go to work with this geoengineering project or planetary engineering project and use these little budded emens that.
[01:42:06] Speaker A: It also turns out you can create fuel from them, because if there's a water ice, and if they're metallic, if they're big hunks of nickel and iron, you can use a little magnetic field across it and print 3d parts inside the balloon. So you can actually viably think about building Gerard O'Neill's type, you know, super superyacht, cruise ship type, thing that millions or a billion people could live in. You could actually do it from the extent materials. And not only build the Edens which are feeding those environments, but build those megastructures. And whether or not this gets done in this century or not, it actually is a viable technology without its sustainable way to do it. Yeah, and I've been meeting with various people in the last couple of years, including Elon musk, I had dinner with a couple of years ago, too. He actually wanted to ask me about what happens if there are microbes on Mars. If we send starship to Mars and we dump our bilge on the surface, will we contaminate the Mars biosphere? And my answer was, they're going to be tough little buggers. They're going to be in the rocks, the whole planet wide. And they're going to be halophilic extremophile microbes. And I don't think there's anything that we could do to contaminate that because everything we put on the surface will get sterilized by uv radiation. And of course, the message to him was, it's not a good place to actually do anything. You can't grow potatoes there and whatnot. You know, that's the unspoken message. Mars is not a good environment to try to do this. And Gerard O'Neill had the right idea in the seventies.
[01:43:59] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:44:00] Speaker A: And so who's to do that project? I don't know. But, for example, if we can generate a million tons of water and fuel in cislunar space or in low Earth orbit, we suddenly have access to the whole solar system through a system like starship, which is just starting to get fly to actually do its first orbital flight, where it doesn't break up at the end? Test flight four, hopefully. And so this thing is opening. Reusable spacecraft, refueled in space, fed in space, and even to some extent made in space, is now as a possibility.
It certainly, and it's happening through a lot of brilliant engineering. So the question is, does this happen?
How does it benefit? How does it refactor how we think of Earth? Does. Does it. It make us better stewards of the Earth? Because we learn how to manage biospheres ourselves, we become the true caretaker of a full biosphere. So does that create an entire, almost a spiritual or philosophical basis? We're looking back at the Earth, and you see a big biosphere, the one that you're caretaking.
What do future humans do in 70 years when they have that type of overview?
[01:45:22] Speaker B: But the question is, yes. I mean, this would work if we had 100 years or 150 years to work this out.
What concerns me is that the planetary ecosystem is collapsing. We're very busy fighting and killing each other. We don't have time for this. It takes a planetary level of cooperation and vision, and things are on the planet. The planet is spiraling toward uninhabitability.
So the timeframes were working on that. It would take probably at a minimum of 50 years to develop the first prototype systems like this. We may not have 50 years, and it would take some hundreds of years beyond that. I guess I'm reading on the parade in some ways, but just in terms of the accelerating collapse of not only the planetary ecosystems, but social systems, it all is happening pretty fast.
[01:46:40] Speaker A: Dennis. I tend to taking the longer view 300,000 years of human evolution as sort of mostly human, but 4 billion years of life, finding a way through even harder tight spots than we're in now that we sort of created for ourselves. I have a really high degree of confidence because we are so innovative, we are thinking beings. We can think in terms of planetary scales.
I really. I don't even think I said I used to think of this as the Hollywood car finish, a car chase finish, right?
There's a car chase at the very end of the film, and it's just by a whisker kind of a thing that happens. I think we've got a really good team on board, and we're evolving about as fast as the ecosystem may be showing its tatters. The ecosystem is also repairing itself faster.
We're seeing genetic diversity actually push that. We're seeing higher CO2 levels cause forest regrowth very much more rapidly. A friend of mine has a company that uses satellites to track forest regeneration and sell carbon credits, and they're watching rainforest recovery much faster than historically seen.
We're. We're good at this, and I think that we're going to have some casualties, but I think that human beings are the most adaptable species ever seen, except for the great mullein, which grows from high altitude down to sea level. Maybe there's a plant that's more adapted than we are, but we've. We live in the high Arctic all the way through, you know, into deep rainforests. We live in desert environments, and we build habitats and we can learn to live off our own planet. And I think there's just the. Lacuma said, you're my greatest creation. You are beautiful. And if we start believing that, we will, I think, put ourselves up to a different standard and a different task and psychedelic elixirs, if I could call them elixirs beyond medicines, allow people for a moment to see and feel the beauty of what a human being is, as well as the world that made us, and to really know it. And it's spreading rapidly. These tools are spreading very rapidly. Mindfulness practices can also get you there. And so human beings never have had such a panoply of brilliant tools and vision as we've had ever in our history.
Everyone can be a bodhisattva for a moment these days, and we are learning how to stay in that state more and more and more of us by orders of magnitude. And if it is a Karl Hollywood car finish, it's whether the one hand, the hand of doubt, fear and despair, and presumptive negative consequence is facing and pushing against the hand of positivity and solutioning and a spirit of hope, because one needs the other. So the despairing part is pushing against the one that is powerful and is pushing toward life. And they're pushing up together. So as they get higher and higher together, the traumas that come through this side start to blur the possibilities of the healing touch, the traumas. And you get this fuzziness that happened to me in my ayahuasca experiences. And you get this union where the trauma is beheld, it is held, and it is resolved, is unwound, but it is also honored. And then the brilliance of just existing and the positivity and the amazement of just being alive comes through. And it literally creates this whole thing that in the past was the opening to all, the opening to this, this whole unity of like, oh my God, it's all amazing, including the traumas, including the craziness. It's all astounding. It's totally rare in the cosmos.
We own it all. We are at all. We're going to actually not let it take us down.
We're not going to ignore it. But we can work with it, and we will persist. We were the product of 4.1 billion years of unlikely, astounding probability and energy driven molecular cycling.
Theres a huge force behind all this. Theres a huge sunk cost in all this, and its just going to keep going. I dont see its but to have better lives, we shouldnt, we should strive to live, not in a sense of despair, because every moment, alive and healthy, is precious.
So I would say that's what I would potentially leave you with.
[01:52:17] Speaker B: That is a very positive message. Every time I talk to you, Bruce, I feel better.
There's a tendency, I guess, in my own nature to give in to despair. But despair solves nothing. And your optimism, based on not just blind optimism, but actual knowledge of science and technology and the abilities that we have, means there's really, I think there is a lot of hope. And I appreciate your confidence and that optimism. I put some of that in a bottle and ship that my way. Would you? Well, maybe I need a bottle of ayahuasca. I don't know, but that's exactly right. And I think we cannot know.
We can speculate about the future, but there are so many variables, and the future and existence has a way of astonishing us.
Many surprises in store, and maybe some good surprises.
Certainly lots of fine minds, people with minds like you, visionaries, are working on this and thinking about it every day. More people need to do that, and more people have to realize, you know, all is not lost. You know, all is not lost until it is lost. You know, my dad was no philosopher, you know, but he always said, and I took it to heart, he said, remember, while there's life, there's hope.
You know, that's a very simple thing from a simple man, but it's a pro. It's a complex, profound thing to say.
[01:54:22] Speaker A: And I would invite anyone listening who wants to sort of join in this work.
There's a little plug, a shameless
[email protected]. Dot. You can actually come in and send me a message. You can fill out our survey, our simple survey of how did you get a visionary download? Let's figure this out.
[01:54:45] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:54:46] Speaker A: And join in with this little ragtag nonprofit. And one of the things I can leave you all with is it was about 03:00 in the morning up in the library at Terrence's house, and, you know, the room of which I speak, and we're both sitting on our tailbones, and he's got his lighter on the ground and his fat one there, and we're both smoking and all. He's surrounded by all these amazing books. You know what went into Terence's head? There are very few who could take in that amount and synthesize it, just an extraordinary capacity. But he looked at me with a twinkle in his eye and said, what is going on?
What is going on? And it was such a impish, elvish, fun kind of question.
It didn't carry kind of any dark overtones. It carried a sense of delight that this man had absorbed all this stuff and he'd done all this journeying with yourself and all this prognostication, some of which was not even falsifiable but all this stuff comes out and he's still at that stage, and this is just before the end of his life. He's taking delight in this. What is going on? You know, he's just astonished by all this. And I think that's what we could take from Terence, you know, into our own hearts, into our inquiry.
[01:56:29] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. What is going on?
Opportunities to be astonished. Every day. Every day, things are going on. Bruce, this has been a fantastic conversation.
[01:56:44] Speaker A: Feeling is mutual. And I always look forward to these with you because I think we always move a notch forward, like we're evolving something.
[01:56:55] Speaker B: Well, people will appreciate this and can share and contribute to it. Absolutely. Check out the center for Minds and the McKenna Academy.
This is our helping to develop our vision, which is to bring ideas like this to people and basically stimulate thinking and conversation and reflection. So this has been a good one. I'll let you go. And thank you. Thank you again. So much. Honored to have you here.
We'll do this again soon.
[01:57:36] Speaker A: Very much.
My pleasure, Dennis. And we shall.
[01:57:41] Speaker B: Okay. Take care.
[01:57:47] Speaker A: Join our mission to harmonize with the natural world. Support the McKenna Academy by donating today.
[01:58:07] Speaker B: Thank you for listening to brain Forest cafe with Dennis McKenna.
[01:58:11] Speaker A: Find us online at McKenna Academy.
