Okay, well I trust that that was all perfectly clear before the break.
 This is the part I enjoy the most because I'm not into the white guy at the front of the room with all the answers, Trip.
 It's just unfortunate that I have the body I do.
 I'm actually a lesbian trapped in a man's body, but I've done the very best with that that I could, which hasn't been bad, let me tell you.
 Um, yes.
 Wait a minute, wait, wait. You're going to have to yell and then I'll repeat it.
 Well, this is a really interesting question. I can talk about it. I'll repeat the question. It's can I talk about the relationship of advanced mathematics to modeling of consciousness and in layman's terms, correct?
 Um, one of the great mysteries still to be addressed by philosophy is why is it that numbers, which are after all constructs of the human mind, why is it that numbers are so incredibly powerful for the description of nature?
 Nature, after all, is somehow given. We find it all around us and numbers arise in the depths of human ratio senation.
 So what is the relationship of these things to each other?
 This is it may appear to be an easy question.
 It's such a difficult question that it wasn't even asked in philosophy until the 20th century.
 It's very puzzling, and I think that it indicates a fundamental congruency between processes that are mental and the structure of the world itself.
 This is why I didn't get into it too much tonight in a popular lecture like this, but I'm the inventor or the purveyor of a mathematical theory of consciousness.
 And I believe that more powerful than any atom smasher, more subtle than any space telescope is the human mind. The human mind is the most subtle and superb of all instruments for the study and measurement of nature.
 When we look into ourselves, we discover the same patterns that we discover in the birth and death of a species, the flow of a river, the collapse of a corporation, or the flowering of a love affair.
 It's the process is somehow under the aegis of a kind of universal equation of description.
 So it doesn't matter whether it's the birth and death of your hope or the rise and fall of the Assyrian Empire or the evolution of the Pacific Ocean.
 Processes always occur in the same way, and this is why there is congruence between the mental world of human beings and the world of abstract mathematics and the world of nature.
 These things are, as it were, simply different levels of condensation of the same universal stuff.
 This is why the concept of truth can have some meaning.
 I mean, when you think about it, truth, why should it even be possible for us as monkeys to entertain that notion?
 Where is it writ large that mammals traveling in packs should have any relationship to truth whatsoever?
 And yet the faith is that somehow thinking means something.
 It's not just something we do.
 It means something.
 It means something because there is sufficient freedom within the human system to be both right or wrong.
 And this right or wrong lays upon us the obligation of mirroring nature in models which we build in our own minds.
 Now, the old idea in science was that these mathematical models of nature were in fact laws, truths, eternal platonic truths that were being teased out.
 In the 20th century, a slight epistemological sophistication leads to this word "models" where we say we're modeling reality.
 And our model is only as good as we need it to be.
 If we're trying to model the flight of an artillery shell, the model needs to be only good enough to get the artillery shell to its target.
 We don't need to understand the essence of lead or the nature of motion there.
 We simply need the model to kick out the data that interests us.
 And in the 20th century, it's been understood that all knowledge is dependent upon the question asked.
 And the relationship of mathematics to nature is one of the profound indicators, I think, that truth can be known.
 Maybe not the truth, but I always think of the positivist philosopher Wittgenstein who was once asked in a classroom situation about a certain proposition, "Is it the truth?"
 And he said, "Well, it's certainly true enough."
 And, you know, that's where we are with our modeling of the world and with our mathematics.
 It is the truest truth we know. It is true enough.
 Somebody else here. Yeah, in front.
 [Audience member] How do you explain the magician?
 The question is from a stage magician, and the question is, "What is the nature of magic?" or "What is magic?" or the wonder that it invokes.
 There are two theories. I mean, magic is not a trivial issue at all.
 There are two theories about how the world works, and each one depends on a fundamental assumption about what the world is.
 There's the scientific theory, which says the world is tiny packets of matter squealing along through empty space at close to the speed of light and subject to a certain set of interlocking laws.
 That's what science tells us the world is.
 Another theory is, and to my mind, a much more appealing and even intuitively correct theory, is the world is language.
 The world is made of language.
 We can say that the world is composed of little demons doing calisthenics, each one the size of a piss ant's eyebrow.
 Or we can say the world is made out of wave mechanical packets of matter flying along at the speed of light.
 But notice that what we get each time is words.
 Our model of what the world is is made of words, and the world is composed of description.
 Now, in the era before science, scientists like to say people were more epistemologically naive.
 What they mean by that is they didn't have a clear understanding of the division between the inside and the outside, between what we imagine and what actually is.
 But if you live long enough, I think you discover what we imagine and what actually is are very close to the same thing.
 Now, whenever you say the world is made of language, the positivists object by saying, "Well, then why isn't it the way we say it is?"
 I didn't say it's the way we say it is.
 I said it's made of language.
 And part of the inspiration for my career is the realization that you could get up in front of audiences and say how the world is.
 And to a small degree, for a limited time in a limited space, it shimmers and recasts itself and becomes the thing that we say that it is.
 The mind is somehow a co-creator in the process of reality through acts of language.
 And language is very, very mysterious.
 I mean, it is true magic.
 People run all over the place looking for paranormal abilities.
 But notice that when I speak, if your internal dictionary matches my internal dictionary, that my thoughts cross through the air as an acoustical pressure wave and are reconstructed inside your cerebral cortex as your thought, your understanding of my words.
 Telepathy exists.
 It's just that the carrier wave is small mouth noises.
 All so-called primitive people know that the world is made of language, that you sing it into existence, that what you say it is is what it is, that it is maintained in existence by an act of rational apprehension.
 And it's only science which has taken this very weird approach and said no, no, the world is somehow independent from the act of description.
 And this is not a situation where we have two separate points of view, both open-hearted and trying their best to work hard for you.
 Science carried out its analysis of nature to the point where it shot itself in the foot.
 Science carried out an analysis of nature that went to such depth that it discovered that nature doesn't exist except as an object of description, that there are no little objects winging their way through empty space.
 There is only a situation describable by multileveled fishy formula, and when you drop a mind into that situation, the fishy formula condense out into a little particle which can be measured.
 Mind is necessary for the world to undergo the formality of existing.
 This is what quantum physics teaches.
 Unfortunately, this news has not reached the other sciences.
 This is a real failure on the part of science.
 You see, throughout the 19th century, physics was the paradigmatic science.
 It was the science everybody envied.
 It's not unusual in physics for theory and experiment to be congruent to three decimal points of accuracy.
 That just causes scientists to go wild.
 They love that when theory and measurement fall into congruency like that.
 And so everyone wanted to be like physics.
 Chemistry sought that.
 Sociology, psychology, biology.
 Meanwhile, physics, pursuing the exploration of matter, broke through to a domain where matter ceased to be definable, ceased to even exist in any ordinary way, seemed to behave in incredibly strange ways.
 Time flows backward. Energy crosses barriers without ever going through them, by tunneling through them in some way.
 Modern biology is still afflicted with physics envy.
 Meanwhile, physics has gone on to a realm of such exotic and surreal uncertainty that it's, at this point, to the left of psychology in the precision of its metaphors.
 Science has undercut itself and now exists in a state of unrecognized crisis that, hopefully, the psychedelic experience will exacerbate to the point where this will arrive on the plate of every experimentalist and observational and observer of nature.
 Yeah, here.
 People don't take enough. That's all.
 You know, I mean, people are confused about what's going on.
 First of all, taking psychedelics has a certain measure of chicness about it.
 Well, everybody wants to be chic.
 And you can get into the club merely by saying you took it.
 You don't want to lie like a dog. So the way to get into the club without paying your dues is to take some piss-ant amount and then run around raving about that.
 So when we talk about the psychedelic experience, it's not clear we're all talking about the same thing.
 It's sort of like talking about France and you have the people who changed planes in the airport and the people who moved there for 30 years and learned the literature and got a job and married the locals.
 So the way to do psychedelics is, I believe, at higher doses than most people are comfortable with and rarely and with great attention to set and setting.
 The social use of psychedelics in the club scene or at rock and roll concerts and so forth, I mean, when I go to those kind of scenes, I just smoke pot.
 I don't -- because I want to be part of what's going on. I want to have a good time.
 But you would be nuts to take a major psychedelic in that circumstance.
 [Applause]
 Socially dense environments filled with light and noise are a strategy for coming down.
 I mean, if you took a drug you didn't like, the smartest thing to do would be to jog around the block 10 times and then chop a bunch of wood, very similar to dancing your ass off, in other words.
 So the way I recommend doing psychedelics is in silent darkness and with as little input from other people as possible.
 I mean, I say alone if you are experienced. If you're really confident, just alone, for crying out loud.
 If that gives you pause and you must have a sitter, and let's use the word "sitter" not "guide." My God, nobody's guiding you anywhere.
 They have no more notion where you are than -- you know, we know where Judge Carter is at this point.
 So the sitter, and my idea of the perfect sitter is, you know, you have a little Tibetan bell by your side and the sitter is three rooms away.
 And if you need the sitter, you ring the bell, they stick their head in the room and say, "It's cool, lay down," and, you know, do that.
 And I, you know, as long as this question was brought up and so much of the lecture was somewhat high-toned, let me get into this for a minute.
 There are thousands of altered states, you know, we know them, orgasm, indigestion, two cappuccinos, where tequila takes you, so endless altered states.
 And I'm not really interested in them more or less than any of you are. I mean, they're part of life.
 But what I'm interested in, as an experimentalist, as a connoisseur of nature, you know, somebody who loves fossils, butterflies, rainforests, that kind of thing,
 is this family of compounds called the indole hallucinogens. Indoles. And they cause hallucination.
 And some people say, you know, that I'm a fetishist about this, that who cares, or that there are other things besides hallucination.
 Yes, I know, maybe, and of course, but the reason I'm so fascinated by hallucinations is because, to my mind, when you're hallucinating,
 you have an absolutely clear proof that you are not generating this material. You know, it's not funny ideas, it's not racing thoughts,
 it's not insight into what your boyfriend really meant yesterday. That kind of thing we all can generate by just inspecting our own minds.
 But a hallucination is to be in the presence of that which previously could not be imagined.
 And if it previously could not be imagined, then there is no grounds for believing that you generated it out of yourself.
 I mean, we should each know our own inventory, you know. You know what's in your cupboard, you know what's in your chest of drawers.
 For God's sake, you ought to know what's in your mind. Well, then, if something comes forward, and you say, "That's not mine, that's not in my inventory,"
 then you have a kind of perfect proof that this is coming from somewhere else. And then the question becomes, "Where?"
 And we can set off into that. Opinions differ, and nobody has God's truth on it. A reductionist, somebody who didn't like these substances,
 would say, "Oh, well, it's just neurological chaos. It's just you've interrupted the normal functioning of good brain chemicals,
 and evil brain chemicals are now giving a sense of a chaos." Well, that just doesn't cut the mustard.
 I mean, that kind of stuff may work if you're talking to the troops, but not if you're talking to anybody who's ever been there.
 I know what a neurological chaos would look like. It would look like bright lights, moving patterns, colored this, something that.
 It would not be ruins, landscapes, machines, paintings, works of art, building plans, weapons, bits of manufactured technological detritus.
 These things are too coherent. They're objects in some kind of superstructure of the mind.
 And for me, this was the revelation. I didn't get into this business by being an airhead or a screwball.
 My attitude was always, "If it's real, it can take the pressure." You know, you don't have to pussyfoot around the real thing.
 If they're telling you, "Oh, you must lower your voice and avert your gaze," or this and that, then you're probably in the presence of crap.
 Because the real thing is real. It doesn't demand that you adjust your opinion to suit it. It's real.
 That means it is preeminent. That means it sets the agenda.
 And I studied yoga. I wandered around in the East. I was fast-shuffled by BB-eyed little men in dhotis.
 I know the whole spiritual supermarket and rigmarole.
 And I find nothing there to interest me on the level of, you know, five grams of psilocybin mushrooms in silent darkness.
 I mean, that's where the pedal meets the metal. That's where the rubber meets the road.
 And the inspiration for me to get up and talk to an audience like this simply comes from the fact that I cannot believe that this could be kept under wraps the way it has.
 I mean, I kidded with you earlier that they would make sex illegal if they could.
 Well, they can't, so it isn't.
 But the psychedelic experience is as central to understanding your humanness as having sex, or having a child, or having responsibilities, or having hopes and dreams.
 And yet it is illegal.
 We are somehow told we are infantilized. We're told, you know, you can wander around within the sanctioned playpen of ordinary consciousness.
 And we have some intoxicants over here if you want to mess yourself up.
 We've got some scotch here and some tobacco and red meat and some sugar and a little TV and so forth and so on.
 But these boundary-dissolving hallucinogens that give you a sense of unity with your fellow man and nature are somehow forbidden.
 This is an outrage. It's a sign of cultural immaturity.
 And the fact that we tolerate it is a sign that we are living in a society as oppressed as any society in the past.
 [Applause]
 My thing is not about my opinion or what I saw in Africa or anything like that.
 This is, get it straight, this is about an experience.
 Not my experience, your experience.
 It's about an experience which you have, like getting laid or like going to Africa.
 You must do the experience.
 Otherwise, it's just whistling past the graveyard.
 And we're not talking about something like being born again or meeting the flying saucers or something like that where good works and prayer are the method.
 No. If you take a sufficient dose of an active compound, it will deliver itself to you on the money.
 If it doesn't work, take more.
 Nobody is in a position to dismiss this just because it didn't work for them on one or two tries.
 This is an art. It's an art. It's something you coax into existence.
 I mean, you have to learn to make love. You have to learn to speak English.
 Anything worth doing is an art that is acquired.
 This is part of our birthright, perhaps the most important part of our birthright.
 These substances will deliver.
 This is the confoundment of psychology and science generally.
 And that's why it's so touchy for cultural institutions.
 But you are not a cultural institution.
 You are a free and independent human being.
 And these things have your name written on them in big gold letters.
 Yes, here.
 [applause]
 Could you please speak to clairvoyance and whether or not this is a subset of psychedelics and vice versa?
 Well, clairvoyance, all forms of paranormal activity, I think, are part of a 5% leakage
 around normal culturally sanctioned brain function.
 If you read Stan Groff's books about LSD, which is one case history after another,
 virtually every paranormal phenomenon ever catalogued has occurred under the influence of LSD.
 Seeing things at a distance, recovering past lives where then you could actually check the data and it happened,
 knowledge of things going on at a distance.
 I think that we are caged by our cultural programming
 and that this is the most powerful imprisoning factor in our lives.
 That if we could train ourselves simply to remember our dreams, psychedelics would become obsolete.
 If we could train ourselves simply to pay attention to our ordinary states of consciousness
 as we live through our days and nights.
 Culture is a mass hallucination.
 And when you step outside the mass hallucination, you see it for what it is worth.
 Language is partially the key here.
 We cannot move into a reality that we cannot describe.
 If we can't describe a world, we can't be there.
 And so the interesting place to be is at the cutting edge of language.
 And it's interesting that the legacy of the 1960s is a legacy of language evolution.
 I mean, concepts like ego trip, vibe, bummer, so forth and so on.
 I mean, we sneer at these concepts, but there was no word for these things before.
 Once there is a word, then that word is like a stepping stone out into the fog.
 And as long as we let the establishment set the language agenda,
 we will be imprisoned in the tiny, rather pedestrian world of consumerism and schlocko values
 that the establishment has prepared for us.
 So the way I think of these psychedelics, or a different way,
 is that they're catalysts for the imagination.
 Catalysts to say what has never been said, to see what has never been seen,
 to draw, paint, sing, sculpt, dance and act what has never before been done,
 to push the envelope of creativity and language.
 And what's really important is, I call it, the felt presence of direct experience,
 which is a fancy term which just simply means we have to stop consuming our culture.
 We have to create culture.
 Don't watch TV. Don't read magazines. Don't even listen to NPR.
 Create your own roadshow.
 The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe.
 And if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else,
 then you are disempowered.
 You're giving it all away to icons.
 Icons which are maintained by an electronic media,
 so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y or something.
 This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking.
 That is all cultural diversion.
 And what is real is you and your friends and your associations,
 your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears.
 And we're told, "No, we're unimportant.
 We're peripheral. Get a degree. Get a job. Get a this. Get a that."
 And then you're a player.
 You don't even want to play in that game.
 You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers
 who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash
 that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.
 Where is that at?
 Yeah, over here.
 I want to see the main show, "Suck a Baddie" and "The Most Fetish Man in the World."
 Can you give me an overview of the show?
 Well, religion is simply the word we use to describe our intuition
 that there is something outside the realm of culture and the three-dimensional surfaces of things,
 that there is a hidden dimension to reality.
 Call it a plan, a purpose, a loving God, a cosmos instead of a chaos.
 And psychedelics, I believe, reveal a greater order than the order of the human world.
 This is why the way I do them is either in darkness, which means surrounded by the body,
 my body, which is part of nature, or in nature itself, in the mountains, at the beach, in the jungle.
 Because what we are lacking existentially is any sense of order, meaning, and beauty in the world,
 because the society we're living in has no order or beauty or meaning.
 It's just a scam and a rat race.
 But if you take the psychedelics in these contexts where the culture and its artifacts are suppressed,
 then you connect up to the greater whole.
 The question of God, meaning, in Milton's phrase, "the God who hung the stars like lamps in heaven,"
 I don't think psychedelics can address that definitively.
 But there is another God, a goddess, the goddess of biology,
 the goddess of the coherent animal-human world, the world of the oceans, the atmosphere, and the planet.
 In short, our world, the world we were born into, that we evolved into, and that we came from,
 that world the psychedelics want to connect us up to,
 because our individuality as people and as a species is an illusion of bad language
 that the psychedelics dissolve into the greater feeling of connectedness that underlies our being here.
 And to my mind, that's the religious impulse.
 It's not a laundry list of moral do's and don'ts or a set of dietary prescriptions or practices.
 It's a sense of connectedness, responsibility for your fellow human beings and for the earth you're walking around on.
 And because these psychedelics come out of that plant-vegetable matrix, they are the way back into it.
 I want a woman here.
 [Audience member] Why did I...?
 Good question.
 Well, the answer is, I think, pretty obvious.
 Yes, how do we emancipate people from the foolishness of the drug war?
 How do we, as a community, as a point of view, how do we gain legitimacy?
 This is a really important question.
 If you look around yourself tonight, you don't see the uneducated, the unhealthy, the demented or the deluded.
 And yet this is the stereotype of our subculture.
 Instead, what you see are well-dressed, creative people holding down positions in society,
 the parents of children, the heads of departments, the authors of books, the painters of paintings.
 You may not have noticed, but in this society, they're not handing out rights.
 Ask black people. Ask members of any sexual minority.
 They don't hand out rights in this society.
 And we, meaning we psychedelic people, by and large, this isn't always true,
 but by and large, we tend to be white and middle class.
 A translation of those two terms into gutless would not be inappropriate.
 We have the most to lose.
 And so we're not given to hurling ourselves into the breach or building barricades in the street to hurl our bodies against the machine.
 Nevertheless, if you don't claim your political birthright, it will never be given to you.
 And black people and gay people and American Indians, Native Americans,
 all of these people have learned that you don't go on bended knee to petition the official culture for your rights.
 You have to take them.
 And people ask me, you know, how can you stand up and say the things you do?
 Why don't they take you away?
 They don't take me away because they're more chicken shit than you think.
 They're more off balance than you think.
 They're more uncertain of themselves than you think.
 The legitimacy of this point of view is established in their minds.
 The reason drugs are illegal and suppressed and blah, blah, is because you can make a shitload of money off them in that context.
 It's a money issue.
 Do you think a loving government is trying to keep you from jumping out of third floor windows and that's why LSD is illegal?
 I mean, give me a break for crying out loud.
 If this government felt strongly enough about certain issues, all of us between 18 and 26 would be sent off to die for that policy decision.
 So the government is not interested in your health.
 The government is artificially interested in inflating the prices of certain substances in order to create a focus for clandestine money that is used then to destabilize unfriendly governments, murder labor union leaders, kill and blackmail the editors of left-wing newspapers, so forth and so on.
 Drugs are enormous big business and not psychedelic drugs.
 Psychedelic drugs, the only one that ever amounted to anything as a financial enterprise was cannabis.
 And cannabis is many things besides psychedelic.
 The deep, dramatic psychedelics, which are all schedule one, the most repressed schedule, don't produce great amounts of money at all.
 What they do produce is questioning minds.
 They cause people to ask questions.
 They cause people to ask for clarification.
 They cause people to challenge cultural values because they decondition you.
 It doesn't matter whether you're a Hasid, a communist apparatchik, a rainforest shaman.
 If you take psychedelics, you will question your first premises.
 And that is a business that all governments, right, left, middle, are in the business of repressing.
 They don't want to have to explain why things are done as they are.
 But if we don't begin asking for that explanation, they're going to run this planet right into ruin.
 And we are the generation responsible.
 You are the generation that is responsible.
 You can't claim that you grew up in a village in Nigeria and you didn't know.
 You can't claim that you're the child of poor Bangladeshi parents and you had no opportunity.
 The responsibility rests upon the educated and the financially capable of doing something about it.
 And by that measure, you and I are probably in the upper 3% of people on this planet.
 And if we don't take responsibility, then that responsibility will devolve to others.
 B.D.I.ed others with an agenda that would stand your hair on end.
 Yes, over here.
 This will be the last question, so make it hit.
 Well, let's go back and talk about schizophrenia for just a second.
 The question is, you know, schizophrenia involves basically breaking with ordinary value systems
 and how does it relate to the psychedelic state and people who have schizophrenic relatives in their family tree,
 how should they relate to the psychedelic experience and so forth?
 I mean, I'm extrapolating, but that's the basic thing.
 Well, there are different things to be said about this.
 I mean, first of all, you know, how many psychiatric residents,
 who are the people who come most in contact with schizophrenics, whatever that means,
 how many psychiatric residents have ever seen an undrugged schizophrenic?
 Very, very few, because the very first thing that happens is for the convenience of physicians and the nursing staff,
 some outlandish drug is brought into the picture,
 which then deflects this healing process from ever reaching any kind of natural conclusion.
 Schizophrenia is just a catch-all term for mental, forms of mental behavior that we don't understand.
 In the 19th century, there was a term, melancholia, which we would now call bipolar depression, so forth and so on.
 But all forms of sadness, unhappiness, maladaptation, so forth and so on, were poured into this label melancholia.
 Now, schizophrenia is a similar thing.
 I can remember an experience I had years ago.
 I was in the Tolman Library at the University of California, which is the psych library,
 and I was looking up some drug or something, and I just saw a book, and I pulled it off the shelf, a book about schizophrenia.
 And it said, "The typical schizophrenic lives in a world of twilight imagining, marginal to his society,
 incapable of holding a regular job, these people live on the fringes, content to drift in their own self-created value system."
 I said, "That's it? That's it? Now I understand."
 We have no tradition of shamanism. We have no tradition of journeying into these mental worlds.
 We are terrified of madness. We fear it because the Western mind is a house of cards,
 and the people who built that house of cards know that, and they are terrified of madness.
 Tim Leary once said, or I gave him credit for saying, he later told me he never said it, but whoever said it, this was a brilliant statement.
 Someone once said, "LSD is a psychedelic substance which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have not taken it." Right?
 And I would bet you that more people have exhibited psychotic behavior from not taking LSD, but just thinking about it,
 than ever exhibited it from taking it. Certainly in my family, I watched my parents both go psychotic from the mere fact that LSD existed.
 They would never have taken it. There is a great phobia about the mind.
 The Western mind is very queasy when first principles are questioned.
 Rarer than corpses in this society are the untreated mad, because we just can't come to terms with that.
 A shaman is someone who swims in the same ocean as a schizophrenic,
 but the shaman has thousands and thousands of years of sanctioned technique and tradition to draw upon.
 In a traditional society, if you exhibit "schizophrenic tendencies," you are immediately drawn out of the pack,
 and put under the care and tutelage of master shamans.
 You are told, "You are special. Your abilities are very central to the health of our society.
 You will cure. You will prophesy. You will guide our society in its most fundamental decisions."
 Contrast this with what a person exhibiting schizophrenic activity in our society is told.
 They're told, "You don't fit in. You are becoming a problem. You don't pull your own weight.
 You are not of equal worth to the rest of us. You are sick. You have to go to the hospital.
 You have to be locked up. You are on a par with prisoners and lost dogs in our society."
 So that treatment of schizophrenia makes it incurable.
 Imagine if you were slightly odd, and the solution were to take you and put you,
 lock you into a place where everyone was seriously mad.
 That would drive anyone mad.
 If you've ever been in a madhouse, you know that it's an environment calculated to make you crazy and to keep you crazy.
 This would never happen in an aboriginal or traditional society.
 I wrote a book. I mean, this has to be the wrap-up because we're over time.
 But I wrote a book called The Archaic Revival. I signed it tonight for some of you.
 The idea there is that we have gone sick by following a path of untrammeled rationalism,
 male dominance, attention to the visible surface of things, practicality, bottom-line-ism.
 We have gone very, very sick.
 And the body politic, like any body, when it feels itself to be sick, it begins to produce antibodies
 or strategies for overcoming the condition of dis-ease.
 And the 20th century is an enormous effort at self-healing.
 Phenomena as diverse as surrealism, body-piercing, psychedelic drug use, sexual permissiveness, jazz,
 experimental dance, rave culture, tattooing. The list is endless.
 What do all these things have in common?
 They represent various styles of rejection of linear values.
 The society is trying to cure itself by an archaic revival, by a reversion to archaic values.
 So when I see people manifesting sexual ambiguity or scarifying themselves or showing a lot of flesh
 or dancing to syncopated music or getting loaded or violating ordinary canons of sexual behavior,
 I applaud all of this because it's an impulse to return to what is felt by the body, what is authentic, what is archaic.
 And when you tease apart these archaic impulses, at the very center of all these impulses
 is the desire to return to a world of magical empowerment of feeling.
 And at the center of that impulse is the shaman, stoned, intoxicated on plants,
 speaking with the spirit helpers, dancing in the moonlight, and vivifying and invoking a world of conscious living mystery.
 That's what the world is. The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists.
 The world is a living mystery. Our birth, our death, our being in the moment, these are mysteries.
 They are doorways opening on to unimaginable vistas of self-exploration, empowerment, and hope for the human enterprise.
 And our culture has killed that, taken it away from us, made us consumers of shoddy products and shoddier ideals.
 We have to get away from that. And the way to get away from it is by a return to the authentic experience of the body.
 And that means sexually empowering ourselves, and it means getting loaded,
 exploring the mind as a tool for personal and social transformation.
 The hour is late. The clock is ticking. We will be judged very harshly if we fumble the ball.
 We are the inheritors of millions and millions of years of successfully lived lives
 and successful adaptations to changing conditions in the natural world.
 Now the challenge passes to us, the living, that the yet-to-be-born may have a place to put their feet and a sky to walk under.
 And that's what the psychedelic experience is about, is caring for, empowering, and building a future that honors the past,
 honors the planet, and honors the power of the human imagination.
 There is nothing as powerful, as capable of transforming itself and the planet as the human imagination.
 Let's not sell it straight. Let's not whore ourselves to nitwit ideologies.
 Let's not give our control over to the least among us.
 Rather, you know, claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light.
 The tools are there. The path is known.
 You simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead
 and get with the program of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination.
 Thank you very, very much.
 Thank you. Thank you.
 Thank you.
 Thank you.
 Thank you.
 Thank you.
 [Applause]
 Oh


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