To talk about tonight simply because it's the thing that is moving me to the edge of my chair at the moment Is I called the talk Eros and the Eschaton and what I could have called it is Eros and the Eschaton What science forgot? Because somebody asked me recently Is there any permission to hope More specifically is there any permission for smart people to hope I mean it's easy to hope if you're stupid but Is there any basis for intelligent people to hope and I I wanted to deal with that because I I think so I mean it was to me a shocking question because I I live in an aura of hope Because I live in a twilight world of my own self-generated Cannabinated fantasy and I forget that not everyone is so fortunate and and that there's a lot of Despair and uncertainty out there, so I wanted to talk about this I'll talk for a while, and then we'll break and Have an intermission. I'll sign books if anybody needs a book signed and then we'll come back and do Q&A on this till Till we're sick of it basically Yeah, and if there's a technician adjusting this help me out a little bit Eros and the Eschaton these are the two Areas that I think compromise the old paradigm and give Permission to hope and strangely neither of these words is that well known? Which gives you a measure of how completely the dominator? position has squelched subverted and and downplayed any Transition to its worldview Eros we know about in some kind of devalued Sticky kind of glitzy way because we get it in the erotic ization of media and society but really what Eros means in in the Greek sense is the kind of unity of nature a kind of all pervasive order that bridges one ontological level to another This is not permitted in the official worldview of our civilization, which is science the the world of Inorganic chemistry is not thought to make any statement about the organic world And the organic world is not thought to be Extrapolatable into the world of culture and and thought there are imagined to be clear breaks in these categories I had a biologist tell me once if genes aren't involved it ain't evolution So that means you can't talk about the evolution of the earth as a physical body You can't talk about the evolution of human social institutions Evolution is somehow a word appropriate to biology and appropriate Nowhere else and this brings me then to the first Factor Easily discerned by anybody who has their eyes open That compromises and erodes the hopeless existential view of the world that we're getting from science and that is the Idea that nature is in fact across all scales and all levels of phenomena a unity It's not a coincidence that electrons spinning around an atomic nucleus and planets going around a star and star clusters orbiting around the gravitational center of a galaxy It's no coincidence that these Systems exhibit the same kind of order on different scales and Yet science would say that is a coincidence Coincidence, you know PW Bridgman who was a philosopher of science Defined a coincidence as what you have left over when you apply a bad theory It means that you know You've overlooked something and what jumps out at you as a coincidence is actually a set of relationships whose whose Heuristry is simp whose relationships to each other are simply hidden from you And what I've observed and I think it is fair to give credit to the psychedelic Experience for this what I've observed is that nature builds on previously established levels of Complexity this is a great general natural law That your own senses will confirm for you But that has never been allowed into the canon of science And what I mean by that nature builds on complexity is the following when the universe was born in the dubious and controversial circumstance called the Big Bang It was at first simply a pure plasma of Electrons it was the simplest that it could possibly be There were no atoms. There were no molecules There were no highly organized systems of any kind there was simply a pure plasma of expanding energy and as the universe cooled simply cooled new kinds of phenomena We say emerged out of the situation as the universe cooled atomic nuclei could form and Electrons could settle in to stable orbits as the universe further cooled the chemical bond became a possibility still later the hydrogen bond which is a weaker bond which is the basis of biology so as the universe aged it Complexified this is so obvious That it's never really been challenged, but on the other hand. It's never been Embraced as a general and dependable principle either Follow it through with me out of atomic systems come chemical systems out of chemical systems Comes the covalent hydrogen bond the carbon bond complex chemistry that is prebiotic or organic out of that chemistry come the physical systems that we call membranes gels charge transfer complexes this sort of thing these systems are the chemical Preconditions for life Simple life the life of the prokaryotes the life of naked unnucleated DNA that characterized primitive life on the planet out of that life come eukaryotes nucleated cells and then complex colonies of cells and then cell specialization leading to higher animals leading to social animals leading to complex social systems leading to technologies leading to globe girdling electronically based information transfer oriented cultures like ourselves As someone said what what's so progressive about media? It's the spreading of darkness at the speed of light It can be it can be well, so this is very interesting that apparently the way the universe works is upon a come upon a platform of previously achieved complexity chemical electrical social Biological whatever new forms of complexity can be built that Cross these ontological boundaries in other words what I mean by that is that biology is Based on complex chemistry, but it is more than complex chemistry Social systems are based on the organization that is animal life and yet It is more than animal life So this is a general law of the universe overlooked by science that out of complexity emerges greater Complexity we could almost say that the universe nature is a novelty conserving or complexity conserving engine It makes complexity and it preserves it and it uses it as the basis for further complexity Now there's more to this than simply that I think we all Observationally could agree with what has been said so far the added wrinkle or an added wrinkle Is that each? Advancement into complexity into novelty proceeds more quickly than the stage that preceded it This is very profound because it if Accepted as a serious first principle it ends the civilization of our own species to speak to the level of Spectator status in a universe that knows nothing of us and cares Nothing for us. This is the most advanced Position that modern science will allow us Spectators to a drama we didn't write shouldn't expect to understand and cannot influence but I say if in fact novelty is the name of the game if in fact the conservation and Complexification of novelty is what the universe is striving for then suddenly our own human enterprise previously marginalized Takes on an immense new importance we are apparently players in the cosmic Drama and in this particular act of the cosmic drama We hold a very central role we are at the Pinnacle of the complex of the expression of complexification in the animal world and somehow this complexity which is Concentrated in us has flowed over out of the domain of animal organization and into this mysterious domain which we call culture language consciousness higher values each stage of advancement Into complexity occurs more quickly than the stage which preceded it after the initial Big Bang there was a period of billions of years when the universe cooled stars condensed planetary systems formed and then the quickening process crossed an invisible Rubicon into the domain of animal and biological Organization well you see since the since the rise of Western monotheism The human experience has been marginalized We have been told that we were unimportant in the cosmic drama but we now know from the feedback that we're getting from the Impact of human culture on the earth that we are a major factor shaping the temperatures of the oceans the composition of the atmosphere the general speed and Complexity of speciation on the planet so forth and so on a single species Ourselves has broken from the ordinary constraints of animal nature and created a new world an epigenetic world Meaning a world not based on gene transfer and chemical Propagation and preservation of information, but a world based on ideas on symbols on technologies on tools on ideas downloaded out of the human imagination and concretized in three-dimensional space as choppers arrowpoints particle accelerators gene sequencers Spacecraft what have you all of this? Complexification occurring at a faster and faster rate and this brings me then to the second Quality or phenomena that science has overlooked Which is the acceleration of a complexification? That the early history of the universe proceeded with excruciating slowness then life took hold in the oceans of this planet a quickening of Process and evolution, but still things proceeded on a scale of tens of millions of years to clock major change Then the conquest of the land higher animals higher exposure to radiation faster change species following species one upon another then 50,000 a hundred thousand a million years ago anyway recently the crossover into the domain of culture tool making myth making dance poetry song story and That set the stage for the fall into history the incredibly Unusual and Self-consuming process that has been going on for the past 15 or 20 thousand years a biological snap of the finger and yet in that time Everything that we call human Everything that we associate with higher values has been Adumbrated elaborated created set in place by one species ourselves this acceleration of time or Complexity shows no sign of slowing down in fact within the fabric of our own lives We can almost daily hourly by the minute feel it Speeding up taking hold it's a cliche that time is moving Faster and faster a cliche of the mass media, but I want to suggest that this is not a Perceptual illusion or a cultural mirage That this is actually happening to the space-time matrix that time is in fact speeding up that history in which we are embedded because our life of 50 to 80 years is so ephemeral on a scale of 10 to 15 thousand years But nevertheless history is a state of incredible Destabilization it's It's a it's a Chaostrophe in the process of happening it begins with animals Kept in balance by natural selection and it ends with a global internet of electronic information Transfer and a language using species hurling its instruments toward the stars There is no reason for us to suppose that this process of acceleration is ever going to slow down Or be deflected it has been a law of nature from the very beginning of nature that this Acceleration was built in what poses a problem? to us as thinking individuals is that the speed of Involution toward Concrescence is now so great that we can feel the tug of it within the confines of our own lives There has been more change since 1960 than in the previous several thousand years there has been more change since 1992 than in the previous thousand years change is accelerating invention connection adumbration of ideas mathematical algorithms connectivity of people social systems This is all accelerating furiously and under the control of no one Not the Catholic Church the Communist Party the IMF No one is in charge of this process. This is what makes history so interesting It's a runaway freight train on a dark and stormy night This is why I'm not particularly sympathetic to conspiracy theory Because I can't make the leap to faith that would cause you to believe anyone could get hold of the beast enough to control it I mean Conspiracies of course we have conspiracies up the kazoo, but none of them are succeeding They're all being swept away compromised astonished by new information and endlessly agonized So two factors relating to Eros the The movement into complexity and the fact that that movement goes ever faster and the second quality the acceleration of the movement into novelty leads me to the third point which is I suppose more controversial and I am frankly willing to admit that my Sensitivity to this third point is based on My psychedelic experience. I mean science is the exploration of the experience of nature without psychedelics And I propose therefore to expand That enterprise and say we need a science beyond science we need a science which plays with a full deck and The reason the psychedelic experience is so important here is not not some Namby-pamby notion that it expands consciousness Or it makes you more perceptive or something like that. I mean that is all true But it isn't strongly enough put a Cultural point of view is like a crystal You have an amorphous cultural medium which at certain temperatures will form a crystal of cultural convention if you will and Within the geometry of that crystal certain things make sense and certain things are excluded from making sense science is a Condensed cultural point of view that is a rigid crystal of interlocking assumptions assumptions such as matter is primary mind is tertiary Causality works from the past into the future so forth and so on what? psychedelics do in terms of their Impact on the physical brain and organism of human beings is they withdraw? cultural programming they dissolve cultural Assumptions they lift you out of that reassuring crystalline matrix of interlocking truths which are lies and Instead they throw you into the presence of the great who knows the mystery The mystery that has been banished from Western thought since the rise of Christianity and the suppression of the mystery religions now The the model that attracts me to the psychedelic experience is not that it makes you smarter a kind of simple-minded idea paradoxically or The idea that you are paying attention Or the idea that it's some kind of magnifying glass into the personal unconscious your trauma your childhood memories The satanic abuse your parents laid on you so forth and so on the the model which I like is a geometric model and Says simply that since the rise of the Greek alphabet print linear thinking and science we have become imprisoned in a causal universe of material connectivity and that this is a cultural myth as much as believing that we are the sons and daughters of The great father who got out of his canoe at the second waterfall to take a leak. I mean these are just cultural myths What is revealed through the psychedelic experience I think is a higher dimensional perspective on reality and I use higher dimensional in the mathematical sense Literally, you are lifted out of the plane of cultural assumptions and can look down with the kind of godlike Understanding that one obtains when one flies in an airplane over a landscape Previously only viewed from the ground in other words from the vantage point of the psychedelic experience The cultural landscape is seen more nearly in its correct perspective seen as historically bounded spatially and intellectually bounded now, it's no coincidence that If you analyze biology what it is It's a kind of conquest of dimensionality the earliest forms of life were Probably slimes of some sort stabilized on a clay surface immobile Unable to perceive light with no sense of time merely a fingernail or a toehold in Existence and then if you look at the entire fossil record what you see is the evolution of senses sensory perceptors and organs of locomotion the perceptors the eye the hand bring into the cognitive field the sense of things at a distance and Then language provides models for these things at a distance similarly fins legs So forth means of locomotion Carry us through space This is a journey of dimensionality and Essentially what animals are that plants are not our life forms? Mobile in a very conscious way in the spatial dimension This is why from the point of view of evolutionary biologists animals are somehow more advanced than plants well if conquest of dimensionality is the criteria then notice that we Again, occupy a special and privileged position in nature because we can not only Run with the best of them See with the best of them but we can remember and anticipate like crazy and Other animals are not doing this other animals may imprint past situations of danger or opportunity But they do not analyze experience and extrapolate it toward the hidden domain of the future and Consciousness is the generalized word that we use for this coordination of complex perception to create a world that draws from the past and builds a model of the future and then Suspends the perceiving organism in this magical moment called the now Where the past is? Coordinated for the purpose of navigating the future McLuhan called it driving with the rearview mirror And the only thing good about it is it's better than driving with no mirror at all All right now What This Conquest of dimensionality comes to be in the presence of psychedelics is an anticipation of the future We can anticipate the future we know to within microseconds when the Sun will rise We know within a few percentage points where the prime rate will be in six months Some things we can predict fairly closely some things with less precision But the perception of the future is very important to us When we marry the need to perceive the future with the psychedelic experience I believe we come up with Data that is very very difficult for science to come to terms with and this is the third item or Really the second item in the list what science forgot. It's what I call the eschaton Now eschaton is a rare word until very recently unheard outside Schools of theology which I understand were a dying enterprise Eschaton Comes from the Greek word esque which just means the end The eschaton is the last thing the final thing and it's very important to science to eliminate from its thinking any Suspicion that this eschaton might exist Because if it were to exist it would impart to reality a purpose you see if the eschaton exists, then it's like a goal or an attraction point or an energy sink toward which historical process is being moved and Science is incredibly hostile Toward the idea of purpose if you are not Involved in the sciences this may come as somewhat of a surprise to you if you are a workbench Scientist or a theoretician you know that this is what's called the problem of teleology it is because Modern science defined itself in the 19th century when the reigning Philosophy was deism and deism was the idea that the universe is a clock made by God and God wound this clock and has walked away from it and the clock will eventually run down that Theological construct was poisonous to evolutionary theory in the 19th century and so they said we must create a Theory of reality that does not require a goal does not require a purpose Everything must be pushed from the past Nothing must be pulled toward the future The problem with this is that it does not Fulfill our intuitions about reality we can see that evolution Biological evolution has built on chemical systems we can see that social and historical systems build on biology as People with open minds or as open as they can be inside this culture we nevertheless have this intuition of purpose and it is Dramatically underscored by the psychedelic experience which takes the raw material of your life your culture your history and tells you this is not an existential Mishmash to be lived out with dignity because there's nothing else to be done with it some kind of commuse in Why not? Affirmation it says no it says you know your your reality is a coherent cosmos and embedded in your own sense of Identity embedded in your own sense of purpose is a Microscopic reflection of the larger purpose that is built into the universe now and This is not just you know blowing smoke in the sense of it's a nice idea Or it's like a religious idea like saying Jesus loves you and so feel all right about yourself It isn't like that. It's it's a theory about reality that has teeth because Reality is actually following the script that this particular version of reality dictates Reality is accelerating toward an unimaginable Omega point we are the inheritors of immense momentum in our social systems our philosophical and scientific and technological approaches to the world Because we're driving the historical vehicle with a rearview mirror It appears to us that we're headed straight into a brick wall at a thousand miles an hour it appears that we are Destroying the earth polluting the atmosphere wrecking the oceans Dehumanizing ourselves robbing our children of a future so forth and so on I believe what is in fact? Going on is that we are burning our bridges? One by one we're burning our bridges to the past we cannot go back To the mushroom dotted plains of Africa or the canopied rain forests of five million years ago, we can't even go back to the year of Cayuse and six shooter of 200 years ago we have burned our bridges we are preparing for a kind of cultural forward escape and This question you know is there cause for optimism? The answer is it depends on where you placed your bets. You know if you placed your bets on Male dominated institutions based on consumer fetishism propaganda criticism and Materialism then God help you you should call your broker if on the other hand You've recognized that a lifeboat strategy is involved here that what is really important is Empowering personal experience Backing off from consumer object fetishism freeing the mind empowering the imagination Then in that case. I think you can feel pretty good about what is going on. You know there's a lot of talk about cultural death and Disenfranchisement, and it's usually couched in terms of some happy naked people in the rainforest or in Uzbekistan making their rugs or milking their camels or something and isn't it too bad that their culture is being blown up and traded in for mall culture and and shopping by remote But in fact all Culture is being destroyed all culture is being Sold down the river to the sub by the sorts of people who want to turn the entire planet into an international airport arrival concourse And that's not the victory of somebody's culture over somebody else's culture nobody ever had a culture like that That's just a cult the victory of schlock Meisterism and crapola over good taste and good sense well if I were if I were dependent on the notion that human institutions are Necessary to pull us out of the ditch. I would be very despairing as I said Nobody's in charge not the IMF the pope the communist party the jews no no no Nobody has their finger on what's going on so then why hope? Isn't it just a runaway train out of control? I don't think so I think the out of control This is the most hopeful thing about it after all whose control is it out of? You and I never controlled it in the first place. Why are we anxious about the fact? That it's out of control. I think if it's out of control then our side is winning To me the most confounding datum of the psychedelic experience Is this thing which I called the eschaton? And I want to talk about it a little bit this evening because I think it is the hardest thing for people to grasp about my particular rap and you know sometimes I've talked to many of you about psychedelic plants shamanism techniques chemistry Approaches so forth and so on I'm approaching this this evening as a graduate seminar I figure everybody has their little mojo kit and their Particular way of approaching these things and then the question is you know what kind of conclusions can we? draw and the conclusion I draw is And this is sort of pulling together what I said before we are central to the human drama and to the drama of nature and process on this planet the opposition which is science Well first let me say this every every model of the universe has a hard swallow What I mean by a hard swallow is a place where the argument cannot hide the fact that there's something slightly fishy about it The hard swallow built into science is this business about the Big Bang Now let's give this a little attention here But this is the notion that the universe for no reason sprang from nothing in a single instant Well now before we dissect this notion now a notice that this is the limit test for credulity Whether you believe this or not Notice that it is not possible to conceive of something more unlikely Or less likely to be believed. I mean I defy anyone It's just the limit case for unlikelihood That the universe would spring from nothing in a single instant for no reason If you believe that my family has a bridge across the Hudson River that will give you a lease option for five dollars It makes no sense it is in fact no different than saying and God said let there be light and what this philosophers of science are saying is give us one free miracle and We will Roll from that point forward from the birth of time to the crack of doom Just one free miracle And then it will all unravel according to natural law and these bizarre equations Which nobody can understand, but which are so holy in this enterprise Well, I say then if science gets one free miracle Then everybody gets one free miracle and I perceive That it is true when you build these large-scale homogonic theories that you have to have a kind of an umbilical cord or a or a point to start from that is Different from all other points in the system So if we have to have a singularity in our modeling of what reality is Let's make it as modest and as non Unlikely a singularity as possible The singularity that arises for no reason in absolutely empty space Instantly is the least likely of all singularities Doesn't it seem more likely if we have to have a singularity that it occurs in a domain? with a rich history with many causal streams feeding into the situation that Nurtures the complexity in other words to put it simply if you have to have a singularity Doesn't it make more sense to put it at the end of a cosmogonic process? Than at the beginning and I think this is the great breakthrough of Psychedelics and shamanism that science got it absolutely wrong The universe didn't begin in a singularity who knows how the universe began or would even presume to Judge, but the universe ends in a singularity It has been growing more singular more complex more unique more novel Every passing moment since it burst into existence and if that's true then we represent a kind of concrescence of universal intent We're not mere spectators or a cosmic accident or some Sideshow or the Greek chorus to the main event the human experience is the main event the coordination of perception of hope of dream of Vision that occurs inside the human heart mind body interface is the most Complex phenomenon in the universe now even the physicalists will agree that the human neocortex represents the most densely ramified matter known to exist in in the biological world and You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see that human society human history human art human literature Represent things for which there is no analog in the world of wasps groundhogs Killer whales and so forth and so on in our species Complexity has turned inward upon itself and in our species time has Accelerated time has left the gentle ebb and flow of gene transfer and adaptation that characterizes biological evolution and instead historical time is Generated and so I believe that science and its reluctance To deal with the psychedelic experience and the way in which science has used then Law to suppress its rival in this case arises out of a profound discomfort on the part of science about this future state of complexification that is clearly the Grail the dwell point the end point of the human historical process No one of us. I think can imagine that history could go on for another Thousand years, I mean what would it look like at the current rate of population growth spread of epidemic disease? rate of invention connectivity depletion of resources the atmosphere It is in possible to conceive of another thousand years of human history history then is Ending history is a kind of gestation process. It's a kind of metamorphosis It's an episode in the life of a species If you think of the the simple example of metamorphosis that of caterpillar to butterfly We all know that there is this intermediate resting stage where the caterpillar is for all practical purposes Dramatically dissolved and then Reconstituted as an entirely different kind of organism with different physical structures different eyes Different legs a different way of breathing with wings where no wings were before with a different kind of feeding apparatus This is what's happening to us History is a process of metamorphosis It's a pupation stage it begins with naked monkeys And it ends with a human machine planet girdling interphase Capable of releasing the energies that light the stars and it lasts about 15 or 20 Thousand years and during that period the entire process hangs in the balance It's a period of high risk. It's like what a butterfly is doing in a cocoon or what is happening to a child In the womb it's a gestation process where one form of life is being changed into another well This would all happen naturally and with a great deal of anxiety I imagine as history builds to its ever more Dramatic and horrifying crescendo and we would all be ignorant or very baffled about what's going on Were it not for the institution of? psychedelic shamanism Remember I said that what is dissolved are the the crystalline structures of cultural assumption Well one of the strongest Cemeteries in our cultural crystal is the cemetery That gathers around the concept of past and future the shaman Actually rises into a domain where past and future are different Areas on the same topological manifold This is not a metaphor It's what's really going on if you think about shamanism in its classical guys for a moment it is about Predicting Weather predicting game movement and curing disease if you had a prescient or extraordinary understanding of the future Each one of us would be able to do these things Predicting the weather you just look into next week and there it is Predicting the movement of games same deal curing the sick Actually involves very judicious choice of your patients with a pre knowledge of who will get well and who will not get well So it's as though the members of the culture are imprisoned in linear time and the shaman is not and Why not? because the shaman has perturbed the brain states sanctioned by the culture sanctioned by its educational processes its habits its attitudes and into that vacuum Created by the perturbation of these cultural values rushes the raw Unanalyzed datum of reality. This is what Aldous Huxley called removing the reducing valve of consciousness and Suddenly culture is seen to be a relative Phenomena the stockbroker no different from the rainforest shaman each somewhat similar to the trobrian islander or the Eskimo Culture is simply clothing upon the human experience But the human organism outside the confines of culture in a direct relationship to nature transcends time and space This was a fact I believe that was known in prehistory And in fact was the source of paleolithic values Which were not material not linear not surplus oriented not class oriented not power oriented but rather oriented toward a kind of egalitarian partnership in in an environment of great material simplicity a human beings lived like that for probably a half a million years with poetry with dance with mathematics with magic with story with humor But not with the paralyzing and toxic artifacts of the late evolving machine Crop-shipping monotheistic linear fanatic alphabet tight-ass straight culture that we are a part of So now at a kind of moment of great cultural challenge and dynamic for Western Civilization which has for a thousand years called all the shots and shoved itself down Everybody's throat whether they liked it or not in the last hundred years through the science of anthropology and ethnography And ethno medicine and botany the news has arrived that these quote-unquote primitive people are in fact master technicians of journeying into a world of the neurological imagination a world we didn't even know exist a World that is as distant to us as the world at the heart of the atom is from the rainforest fishermen and Because our own cultural values seem a little shoddy at this moment those on the fringes of Western civilization have begun to seek alternatives begun to look at Alternative religions yoga tantra Buddhism and whatever alternative approaches to diet Vegetarianism macrobiotic so forth and so on and alternative approaches to authentic experience which means psychedelics in the early stage of psychedelic involvement everyone was sort of flying under the banner of hands-on Freudianism or hands-on Jungianism, you know, we're gonna see those archetypes. We're gonna confront those sexual Repressions we're gonna journey into those traumatic childhood memories Now it's understood I think that those metaphors were fairly inadequate and that actually we stand on the brink of an unexplored landscape of planetary size the world of the high paleolithic which is a Gaian world a world of feeling not analytical intellectual constructs, but a world of empowered feeling empathy and intuitive understanding an understanding that doesn't arise in a context of Greek logic but in a context of animal knowing in the Authentic mode of the body. So just to bring it all around here The great exhibit which we must Always keep in front of ourselves and our critics is the mystery of the human mind and body No one knows how it is that I can command my hand to make a fist And that it will do that. I mean that's mind over matter That's the violation of every scientific principle in the books and yet it is the most trivial experience any of us have we expect to command our body we expect The mental will to order the monkey flesh into action and it will follow the body is the nexus of the mystery of life and our culture takes us out of the body and sells our loyalty into political systems into religions into inanimate objects and machines collections so forth and so on the felt experience of The body is what the psychedelics are handing back to us. That's why it's called escape Because it's escape from HBO from walking the mall from seeing what's on the tube From a consuming trash media. It's escape from all of that into the authenticity of the body This is why sexuality is so Edgy in this society they'd make it illegal if they but could figure out how it's it's the one Drug, they can't tear from our grip and so they lay a guilt trip about it, but sexuality and Psychedelics by carrying us back to an authentic sense of the body Carry us back to the domain of authentic Values and more and more the message that people are getting as they avail themselves of the psychedelic Experience is that it is not a journey into the human unconscious or into the ghost bardos of our chaotic Civilization it's a journey into the presence of the Gaian Mind that the earth is a coherent whole it is a thinking feeling Unending being that in terms of our value structures it would be foolish to image as anything other than female and when cultural values Created by male dominance and science and linearity and so forth and so on when those values are dissolved What is waiting there is this incredibly poignant? experience of Matrix what James Joyce called the mama Matrix most? Mysterious nothing more than our bodies and the earth out of which our bodies came History as we have lived it in the West has been a turning of our back on that and now History has failed Western cultural institutions having become global cultural institutions now show themselves to be adequate to inspire lead or carry anyone into a future worth living in at this Moment, then this reconnecting to the Gaian mind becomes a kind of moral Imperative so this whole drug issue is not an issue even about criminal syndicates or about Untaxed billions or about the mental health of our youth or any of that malarkey? I mean my god the most destructive drugs known to the species are peddled on every street corner without Restriction the real issue is what kind of mental worlds shall people? Inhabit what kinds of hope? Shall be permitted what kind of value systems shall be allowed and the value systems that? aggrandize the possession of things the tearing up of the earth Politician classism racism sexism have led us to the brink of catastrophe Now I think we have to abandon cultural Western cultural values and return to the deeper wisdom of the body in Connection with the plants that's the seamless web that leads us back Into the heart of nature, and if we can do this then this very narrow neck of cultural crisis Can be navigated Very little of the past can be saved the architectonics the machines the systems of monetary exchange and propaganda the silly religions the Asinine aesthetic cannons very little of that can be saved but what can be saved is the sense of love and caring and Mutuality that we all Put into and take from the human enterprise You know there's a Grateful Dead song that says you can't go back and you can't stand still if the thunder don't get you then the lightning will and We now hold through the possession of these psychedelics catalysts for the human imagination of sufficient power that if we use them we can Deconstruct the lethal vehicle that is carrying us toward the brink of apocalypse We can deconstruct that vehicle and redesign it into a kind of starship That would carry us and our children out into the broad starry galaxy We know to be waiting us, but it's a cultural test Nature is pitiless Intelligence is a grand experiment upon which a great deal has been risked But if it proves inadequate nature will cover it over with the same kind of cool impunity that she covered over the Dinosaurs and the Trilobites and the cross-up derision fishes and all those other folks who came before So what we must do I think is see our future in the imagination catalyze the imagination form symbiotic relationships with the plants of firm archaic values and spread the good news that What is out of control? What is in fact dying is a world that had become? Too top-heavy with its own hubris too bent by its own false value systems and too Dehumanized to care about what happened to its own children, so I say good riddance to it Bring on the archaic revival and let's create a new world And that's it [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 10.55 sec Decoding : 4.40 sec Transcribe: 3561.20 sec Total Time: 3576.15 sec