[00:00:00 - 00:00:02]	 Thank you for trying AudioQuarter.
[00:00:02 - 00:00:17]	 >> What I'll do today is I assume most of you are not familiar with my work,
[00:00:17 - 00:00:23]	 but I also assume you're intelligent, so I'm not going to give an introductory talk.
[00:00:23 - 00:00:25]	 I'll just cut to the chase.
[00:00:25 - 00:00:29]	 And if you don't understand what's said, at least you have the satisfaction
[00:00:29 - 00:00:32]	 of knowing nobody talked down to you, right?
[00:00:32 - 00:00:39]	 Okay. It's very hard to know where exactly to slice into this pie.
[00:00:39 - 00:00:45]	 I mean, I am an advocate of the psychedelic experience for --
[00:00:45 - 00:00:50]	 [ Applause ]
[00:00:50 - 00:00:58]	 -- for personal growth work, for shamanic exploration as an enzyme for the imagination,
[00:00:58 - 00:01:03]	 as a force that forces us to grow up and to clean up.
[00:01:03 - 00:01:10]	 However, what I want to talk to you today about, because this is a pagan community,
[00:01:10 - 00:01:18]	 and because I think the argument, if it's not understood here, won't be understood anywhere,
[00:01:18 - 00:01:26]	 is I want to talk about the social impact of psychedelic plants on human consciousness,
[00:01:27 - 00:01:32]	 both in the present and in the remote past.
[00:01:32 - 00:01:38]	 Because my approach to psychedelics is not to see it as a religious freedom issue
[00:01:38 - 00:01:41]	 or a personal self-exploration issue.
[00:01:41 - 00:01:44]	 That's all there.
[00:01:44 - 00:01:52]	 But I believe that we cannot really understand what it is to be a human being
[00:01:53 - 00:02:03]	 and how we came to be human beings without factoring into our explanations this most taboo
[00:02:03 - 00:02:09]	 of all subjects for the Western dominator mind,
[00:02:09 - 00:02:15]	 the subject of boundary-dissolving, consciousness-expanding plants.
[00:02:15 - 00:02:22]	 And so every point of view has a cosmology, a myth of its meaning.
[00:02:22 - 00:02:28]	 And as quickly as I can, I want to tell you the myth that, to my mind,
[00:02:28 - 00:02:39]	 unites paganism, psilocybin, sexual freedom, the peril to the earth, and the hope for the future,
[00:02:39 - 00:02:44]	 all into one very nice, neat package.
[00:02:44 - 00:02:49]	 And it requires a kind of an anthropology lesson.
[00:02:51 - 00:02:59]	 First of all, our fellow voyagers along the way, the scientists, have created,
[00:02:59 - 00:03:07]	 as you all know, the theory of evolution, which has been the great crowning achievement
[00:03:07 - 00:03:09]	 of biology over the past hundred years.
[00:03:09 - 00:03:16]	 First, the Darwinian understanding of natural selection and random mutation,
[00:03:16 - 00:03:22]	 then Mendelian genetics, the discovery of the particulate nature of the gene,
[00:03:22 - 00:03:29]	 then still later molecular genetics, the elucidation of DNA, so forth and so on.
[00:03:29 - 00:03:36]	 The theory of evolution has been very successful in explaining the state of nature
[00:03:36 - 00:03:45]	 on this planet with one tremendously embarrassing exception, which is ourselves.
[00:03:46 - 00:03:54]	 Biological evolution cannot account for a phenomenon like minded human beings involved
[00:03:54 - 00:04:00]	 in the building and maintenance of global electronically sustained societies.
[00:04:00 - 00:04:02]	 How do we do it?
[00:04:02 - 00:04:07]	 Well, we do it because we have a vastly superior cerebral architecture
[00:04:07 - 00:04:10]	 to any other organism in nature.
[00:04:10 - 00:04:16]	 And the interesting thing about that architecture is that it sprang into being
[00:04:16 - 00:04:21]	 in the blink of an eye, geologically speaking.
[00:04:21 - 00:04:26]	 The human brain size doubled in less than two million years.
[00:04:26 - 00:04:31]	 This is the most dramatic expansion in the size of a major organ
[00:04:31 - 00:04:35]	 of a higher animal in the entire fossil record.
[00:04:36 - 00:04:42]	 It would be under any circumstances an embarrassment to the theory of evolution.
[00:04:42 - 00:04:47]	 But notice that the theory of evolution was generated by the very organ we're discussing.
[00:04:47 - 00:04:51]	 So it is doubly embarrassing.
[00:04:51 - 00:04:58]	 Now, obviously, we are the inheritors of extraordinary circumstances.
[00:04:58 - 00:05:06]	 Higher animals have existed on this planet for 200 million years in all kinds of forms.
[00:05:06 - 00:05:12]	 Reptilian life, amphibian life, avian life, mammalian life, and never,
[00:05:12 - 00:05:17]	 so far as the geological history of the planet can tell us,
[00:05:17 - 00:05:26]	 never did machine building, language using, technology producing societies arise.
[00:05:26 - 00:05:36]	 Some extraordinary interaction in our early history is responsible for our circumstance
[00:05:36 - 00:05:41]	 as language using, technology producing creatures.
[00:05:41 - 00:05:45]	 Okay, end of introduction.
[00:05:45 - 00:05:46]	 Here's the scenario.
[00:05:46 - 00:05:51]	 And I hope it has special resonance for this community.
[00:05:54 - 00:06:03]	 All animal species tend to evolve into an ecological niche and stabilize themselves there.
[00:06:03 - 00:06:08]	 Ants and termites have been at equilibrium for hundreds of millions of years.
[00:06:08 - 00:06:17]	 Our remote ancestors also were on a direct course toward that kind of dynamic equilibrium.
[00:06:18 - 00:06:27]	 We were evolving toward being fruit eating, canopy living, insectivorous primates
[00:06:27 - 00:06:31]	 with an advanced repertoire of pack signals.
[00:06:31 - 00:06:36]	 And this was apparently to be our evolutionary destiny.
[00:06:36 - 00:06:43]	 Were it not for the fact that sometime in the last five million years or so,
[00:06:43 - 00:06:52]	 the African continent, which was the site of our environmental proto system, began to dry up.
[00:06:52 - 00:06:59]	 And the forests that had always been our arboreal home began to shrink.
[00:06:59 - 00:07:06]	 And what this spelled for our remote proto hominid ancestors was nutritional pressure.
[00:07:06 - 00:07:08]	 There wasn't enough food.
[00:07:09 - 00:07:17]	 Our remote ancestors began descending from the canopy and exploring the new environment
[00:07:17 - 00:07:22]	 that the aridity was bringing into existence, a grassland environment,
[00:07:22 - 00:07:26]	 an environment of limited numbers of plant and animal species relative
[00:07:26 - 00:07:31]	 to the climax tropical rainforests that were in retreat.
[00:07:32 - 00:07:40]	 Now, the reason animals specialize their food supply is to avoid contact with mutagens
[00:07:40 - 00:07:41]	 in the environment.
[00:07:41 - 00:07:47]	 If you begin experimenting with foods and begin eating everything,
[00:07:47 - 00:07:52]	 you will produce more children with mutations.
[00:07:52 - 00:07:54]	 Some of these mutations will be positive.
[00:07:54 - 00:07:56]	 Most will be lethal.
[00:07:57 - 00:08:04]	 When our remote ancestors came under nutritional pressure, they began expanding their diet.
[00:08:04 - 00:08:10]	 This was the moment when we became partially carnivorous, when we became omnivores.
[00:08:10 - 00:08:16]	 And had I more time, I would lay out many examples of specific plants,
[00:08:16 - 00:08:20]	 such as plants that contain birth control alkaloids and things like that,
[00:08:20 - 00:08:26]	 specific plants that would have impacted early human emergence.
[00:08:26 - 00:08:30]	 But I want to concentrate here on one plant,
[00:08:30 - 00:08:37]	 and that is the psilocybin-containing mushrooms that grow in the dung of cattle.
[00:08:37 - 00:08:45]	 Because I think that if we're looking for a missing link, it isn't a transitional skeleton,
[00:08:45 - 00:08:50]	 it isn't meddling by extraterrestrials, at least not
[00:08:50 - 00:08:54]	 of the overt thousand-ton beryllium ship variety.
[00:08:56 - 00:09:02]	 It has to do with the fact that we began to allow into our diet
[00:09:02 - 00:09:10]	 an exotic pseudo-neurotransmitter that was part of the native flora of the grassland.
[00:09:10 - 00:09:16]	 And I believe that, you know, in the next 10 minutes, I can at least make it seem plausible
[00:09:16 - 00:09:23]	 to you that this mushroom was the triggering factor that moved us
[00:09:24 - 00:09:28]	 from being an advanced hominid, an advanced animal,
[00:09:28 - 00:09:37]	 to being, in fact, a conscious, self-reflecting, caring, thinking, dreaming, striving human being.
[00:09:37 - 00:09:46]	 And here is my answer to this riddle, where did human consciousness come from?
[00:09:46 - 00:09:48]	 It begins like this.
[00:09:48 - 00:09:54]	 In that foraging phase where we were testing all kinds of plants on the grassland,
[00:09:54 - 00:10:00]	 small amounts of psilocybin mushrooms would have naturally been eaten
[00:10:00 - 00:10:03]	 in the process of eating corns and things like that.
[00:10:03 - 00:10:11]	 I personally have seen baboons in Kenya investigating cow patties on the savanna
[00:10:11 - 00:10:17]	 because they know that bug pupa will be under the cow patties.
[00:10:17 - 00:10:23]	 So the cow patties are already set up as vectors for possible sources of nutrition.
[00:10:23 - 00:10:30]	 So there is no question that these proto-hominids would have eaten psilocybin in small amounts.
[00:10:30 - 00:10:36]	 And by small amounts, I mean amounts so small that if you were to eat that much,
[00:10:36 - 00:10:38]	 you would feel nothing.
[00:10:39 - 00:10:49]	 But this dose level has been studied and it causes increased acuity of vision.
[00:10:49 - 00:10:54]	 You can actually give people small amounts of psilocybin and then give them eye tests
[00:10:54 - 00:11:00]	 and they do better if they're slightly intoxicated than if they are not.
[00:11:00 - 00:11:04]	 The guy who proved this, the Viennese psychologist,
[00:11:04 - 00:11:09]	 Roland Fisher, when he described these experiments to me, he said, "And so you see,
[00:11:09 - 00:11:16]	 my young friend, here we have a case where the use of drugs actually introduces us
[00:11:16 - 00:11:22]	 to a more true vision of reality than if we have avoided the drug."
[00:11:22 - 00:11:32]	 Scientific proof that the drug is telling you more about reality than if you had refused it.
[00:11:33 - 00:11:39]	 All right. Now, what kind of visual acuity is it that is being improved?
[00:11:39 - 00:11:42]	 Well, it turns out it's what's called edge detection.
[00:11:42 - 00:11:48]	 In the grassland environment where the movement of small animals means dinner and the movement
[00:11:48 - 00:11:57]	 of large animals means you become dinner, a plant which confers increased visual acuity is going
[00:11:57 - 00:12:04]	 to immediately confer an adaptive advantage on those members of the group that let it in.
[00:12:04 - 00:12:12]	 Those members of the group that refuse it out of aesthetic or gastronomic reasons will tend
[00:12:12 - 00:12:16]	 to be outbred because the psilocybin using members
[00:12:16 - 00:12:22]	 of the species will be more successful at obtaining food and at surviving
[00:12:22 - 00:12:27]	 to raise their own children to reproductive age, which is the name of the game
[00:12:27 - 00:12:29]	 in evolution.
[00:12:29 - 00:12:37]	 So, that's step one of a three-step process that leads to the explosion
[00:12:37 - 00:12:40]	 of consciousness in the hominid brain.
[00:12:40 - 00:12:49]	 Step two, which should have special appeal for this crowd, is that when you take slightly larger
[00:12:49 - 00:13:00]	 doses of psilocybin, not religiously profound doses, but doses which you definitely feel,
[00:13:00 - 00:13:06]	 psilocybin is what's called a CNS stimulant, a central nervous system stimulant.
[00:13:06 - 00:13:13]	 What it causes in animals is what neurophysiologists call arousal.
[00:13:14 - 00:13:22]	 And in highly sexed animals like primates, arousal means in the male, erection.
[00:13:22 - 00:13:31]	 So, what an animal then which is allowing what is essentially a sexual stimulant
[00:13:31 - 00:13:37]	 or an aphrodisiac to enter into the diet, there will be more instances
[00:13:37 - 00:13:41]	 of what anthropologists call successful copulations.
[00:13:43 - 00:13:45]	 And God knows we need that.
[00:13:45 - 00:13:52]	 So, if you have more successful copulations, you have more pregnancies.
[00:13:52 - 00:14:00]	 You have another, a second factor, outbreeding the non-psilocybin using member
[00:14:00 - 00:14:01]	 of the population.
[00:14:01 - 00:14:08]	 Now, something really important here that is my, well, this whole thing is my theory,
[00:14:08 - 00:14:11]	 but here's the part of it that I like the best.
[00:14:13 - 00:14:19]	 All primates, all primates have what are called dominance hierarchies
[00:14:19 - 00:14:21]	 or male dominance hierarchies.
[00:14:21 - 00:14:27]	 This goes right back clear to lemurs and the old world monkeys which are much more, I mean,
[00:14:27 - 00:14:31]	 yes, the new world monkeys which are more primitive.
[00:14:31 - 00:14:38]	 All primates have this dominance hierarchy and what it means is the sharp fanged,
[00:14:38 - 00:14:46]	 hard-bodied young males, they control the women, the children, the elderly,
[00:14:46 - 00:14:53]	 all sexual minorities, everybody is under the thumb of the alpha males.
[00:14:53 - 00:15:00]	 And as we sit here today, though this community may strive to be an exception,
[00:15:00 - 00:15:09]	 as a society, male dominance is an enormous dilemma for us and an enormous distorting factor
[00:15:09 - 00:15:11]	 in our politics and in our lives.
[00:15:11 - 00:15:24]	 So, my notion is that psilocybin by promoting this polymorphic sexual style actually acted
[00:15:24 - 00:15:31]	 as an inoculation against monogamous sexual styles of bonding, you see.
[00:15:31 - 00:15:39]	 And it isn't that the monogamous style, the dominator style disappeared,
[00:15:39 - 00:15:48]	 it was simply medicated out of existence for perhaps 100,000 years it was medicated
[00:15:48 - 00:15:49]	 out of existence.
[00:15:49 - 00:15:55]	 Now, and what it promoted, this arousal, this psilocybin taking
[00:15:55 - 00:16:00]	 around the African campfires by these primitive nomadic pastoralists,
[00:16:00 - 00:16:10]	 what the social change that came with it was, was an orgiastic sexual style,
[00:16:10 - 00:16:14]	 a style where everybody would get loaded around the campfire
[00:16:14 - 00:16:17]	 and then hump in an enormous writhing heap.
[00:16:18 - 00:16:33]	 Now, yes, now, now besides the fact that this is a great deal of fun, it has a very,
[00:16:33 - 00:16:41]	 very profound social effect which is in societies which allow orgy,
[00:16:41 - 00:16:46]	 men cannot trace lines of male paternity.
[00:16:47 - 00:16:51]	 Men cannot trace lines of male paternity.
[00:16:51 - 00:16:52]	 What does this mean?
[00:16:52 - 00:16:59]	 It means that men do not identify with children as property.
[00:16:59 - 00:17:08]	 It means that the men of that kind of a social group can only think in terms of our children,
[00:17:08 - 00:17:15]	 we, the group, our children, and it creates an immensely cohesive social glue
[00:17:16 - 00:17:19]	 that I believe held these societies together for millennia.
[00:17:19 - 00:17:26]	 And I believe that during this period of pharmacological suppression
[00:17:26 - 00:17:31]	 of male dominance we became human beings.
[00:17:33 - 00:17:48]	 Theater, poetry, magic, art, altruism, dance, symbolic and cognitive activity of every sort,
[00:17:48 - 00:17:56]	 was born in that window of opportunity when there was simultaneously a chemical suppression
[00:17:56 - 00:18:03]	 of male dominance and consequently an opening to guy intentionality.
[00:18:04 - 00:18:13]	 To the intent of the larger biological systems in which the human system was embedded.
[00:18:13 - 00:18:18]	 And a kind of paradise came into existence.
[00:18:18 - 00:18:28]	 There were actually two phases, one from about 40 to 30,000 years ago in the interglacial
[00:18:28 - 00:18:35]	 and in that early phase human beings, cattle, and mushrooms were sort
[00:18:35 - 00:18:46]	 of all swirling together there on the African grassland in contact but not yet a coherent triad.
[00:18:46 - 00:18:55]	 The second partnership paradise arose at the last glaciation, at the melt,
[00:18:56 - 00:19:03]	 during the last glacial melt and lasted from about 20,000 years ago to perhaps as much
[00:19:03 - 00:19:07]	 as recently as 10,000 years ago.
[00:19:07 - 00:19:15]	 And it was in that later phase that the Magdalenian explosion occurred
[00:19:15 - 00:19:25]	 and the social forms were put in place that Hellenistic paganism was looking back
[00:19:25 - 00:19:32]	 at with a nostalgic and barely cognizable memory.
[00:19:32 - 00:19:38]	 There was an old, old memory of a kind of paganism
[00:19:38 - 00:19:44]	 that was old 5,000 years before Eleusis laid its cornerstone.
[00:19:44 - 00:19:50]	 I wrote a book called The Archaic Revival in which I tried to say
[00:19:51 - 00:19:57]	 that the entire cultural impulse of the 20th century beginning with Freud
[00:19:57 - 00:20:03]	 and Jung discovering the unconscious, beginning with Picasso dragging back primitive West
[00:20:03 - 00:20:10]	 African masks to Paris and inserting them into his paintings, Dada, pataphysics, jazz,
[00:20:10 - 00:20:16]	 abstract expressionism, even phenomena like national socialism,
[00:20:16 - 00:20:21]	 all of these various impulses in the 20th century, some positive,
[00:20:21 - 00:20:28]	 some negative, all have a common theme, archaism, archaism,
[00:20:28 - 00:20:32]	 a nostalgia for a state before history.
[00:20:32 - 00:20:40]	 And as this tendency, this nostalgia has been sorted out over the last 100 years
[00:20:40 - 00:20:45]	 by generations of scholars beginning with, you know, Freud and Jung and Blavatsky
[00:20:45 - 00:20:51]	 and Crowley and then coming up through all the folklorists and deconstructionists.
[00:20:51 - 00:20:55]	 As this thing has been teased apart, it has become clearer and clearer
[00:20:55 - 00:21:02]	 that the paradigmatic figure in any archetypal revival is the maker of magic,
[00:21:02 - 00:21:11]	 the shaman, the wizard, the seeress, the person who is in control with invisible forces.
[00:21:11 - 00:21:17]	 And as I have lived my life and explored these things for a long time,
[00:21:17 - 00:21:26]	 I've come to the conclusion that the shaman without the hallucinogenic plants is well
[00:21:26 - 00:21:32]	 on the way to becoming priest or priestess, well on the way to being downloaded
[00:21:32 - 00:21:41]	 into a fixed canon, a moral vision, a societal religious structure,
[00:21:41 - 00:21:43]	 which is not what shamanism is about.
[00:21:43 - 00:21:45]	 It's about discordian ecstasy.
[00:21:45 - 00:21:51]	 It's about the felt presence of immediate experience in the absence of theory.
[00:21:51 - 00:21:53]	 That's what it's about.
[00:21:53 - 00:21:59]	 So this, well, and then I want to go back to our little process.
[00:21:59 - 00:22:05]	 We've now covered step one, better vision through mushroom taking leads
[00:22:05 - 00:22:07]	 to better diets and healthier children.
[00:22:08 - 00:22:15]	 Bigger doses lead to an end to monogamy, a dissolution of pair bonding,
[00:22:15 - 00:22:22]	 and a replacement of monogamous anxiety with polymorphic amorousness
[00:22:22 - 00:22:24]	 or whatever you want to call it.
[00:22:24 - 00:22:28]	 Then that's only the second step.
[00:22:28 - 00:22:34]	 The third step is when you double the polyamorous dose.
[00:22:35 - 00:22:38]	 And now hunting is out of the question.
[00:22:38 - 00:22:48]	 And even fucking is out of the question because you are nailed to the ground somewhere off
[00:22:48 - 00:22:55]	 at the edge of the firelight wrestling with a mystery so profound, so bizarre,
[00:22:55 - 00:23:02]	 that even as we sit here with Husserl and Heidegger and Heisenberg and all these clowns
[00:23:02 - 00:23:08]	 under our belts, it is still absolutely mysterious, appalling, challenging,
[00:23:08 - 00:23:12]	 boundary dissolving, and unavoidably ecstatic.
[00:23:12 - 00:23:15]	 It is the living mystery.
[00:23:15 - 00:23:19]	 And I don't know how many of them there are in the world, but for my money,
[00:23:19 - 00:23:27]	 there only has to be one to rescue the entire concept from, you know, the dirty claws
[00:23:27 - 00:23:33]	 of the reductionists, the materialists, the Christers, the nothing butters, the merely this
[00:23:33 - 00:23:34]	 and the simply thatters.
[00:23:34 - 00:23:43]	 [ Applause ]
[00:23:43 - 00:23:50]	 Yeah, I know I'm preaching to the converted, but if I preach to the unconverted,
[00:23:50 - 00:23:52]	 I'd be hung from the yard arm.
[00:23:52 - 00:23:56]	 [ Laughter ]
[00:23:57 - 00:24:01]	 So you may say to yourself, well, this is all very interesting.
[00:24:01 - 00:24:07]	 This guy has some kind of anthropologically revisionist theory, and, you know,
[00:24:07 - 00:24:08]	 that's all well and good.
[00:24:08 - 00:24:09]	 In other words, so what?
[00:24:09 - 00:24:11]	 What does it have to do with us?
[00:24:11 - 00:24:21]	 Well, what it has to do with us is we are in a state of enormous dysfunctional anxiety
[00:24:21 - 00:24:27]	 as a result of the fall into history, which has caused us to have
[00:24:27 - 00:24:36]	 to compromise our sensuality, our connection to the Gaian goddess, our polymorphic sexuality.
[00:24:36 - 00:24:43]	 All of these things have been poured into a new set of social institutions
[00:24:43 - 00:24:48]	 that derive essentially from the invention of agriculture,
[00:24:48 - 00:24:51]	 which is where I think the shit hit the fan.
[00:24:51 - 00:24:53]	 I mean, I'm fairly radical on that.
[00:24:53 - 00:25:02]	 I think that agriculture is the end because it's incredibly successful
[00:25:02 - 00:25:04]	 as a strategy for food production.
[00:25:04 - 00:25:06]	 Well, what does that mean?
[00:25:06 - 00:25:09]	 It means you can't be nomads anymore.
[00:25:09 - 00:25:13]	 Oh, no, you have to build a stone tower to put the grain in,
[00:25:13 - 00:25:19]	 and you have to make sure you can haul large rocks up on top of your tower to drop
[00:25:19 - 00:25:23]	 on people whose grain crop wasn't as big as yours was.
[00:25:23 - 00:25:25]	 We see this at Jericho.
[00:25:25 - 00:25:32]	 The most advanced building in the world of 10,000 BC was the grain tower at Jericho,
[00:25:32 - 00:25:37]	 and it was defensive, and it bespeaks, you know, the primal paranoia.
[00:25:37 - 00:25:45]	 Once people stopped moving across the land, once they violated it with the blade of the plow,
[00:25:46 - 00:25:55]	 then you get sedentary populations, the division between the profane world of the city
[00:25:55 - 00:25:57]	 and the wilderness outside.
[00:25:57 - 00:26:00]	 That's the moment when the division between the unconscious
[00:26:00 - 00:26:07]	 and the conscious mind comes into play, and an entire set of institutions arise then.
[00:26:08 - 00:26:17]	 Male kingship, standing armies, role specialization, slavery, women as chattel,
[00:26:17 - 00:26:23]	 so forth and so on, I mean, we are the unhappy inheritors
[00:26:23 - 00:26:27]	 of this hideous plunge into dysfunctionality.
[00:26:27 - 00:26:34]	 Now, why is it such a hideous plunge into dysfunctionality to live without psilocybin
[00:26:34 - 00:26:37]	 or close relatives thereof?
[00:26:37 - 00:26:44]	 The answer is that this thing which to now I've described as male dominance and a tendency
[00:26:44 - 00:26:51]	 to form dominance hierarchies, we can describe another way and bring much closer to home
[00:26:51 - 00:26:54]	 by saying it is the ego.
[00:26:54 - 00:27:04]	 The ego is a late arriving, very tenuous, highly uncertain of itself,
[00:27:05 - 00:27:11]	 social structure that has taken root in the human psyche like a tumor,
[00:27:11 - 00:27:15]	 like a growth of some sort.
[00:27:15 - 00:27:20]	 It is the leftover of this primate dominance complex,
[00:27:20 - 00:27:25]	 and the way it manifests itself is by the establishment of boundaries.
[00:27:25 - 00:27:29]	 First of all, this is my body, do not touch it.
[00:27:30 - 00:27:37]	 Second of all, these are my weapons and agricultural tools, do not touch them.
[00:27:37 - 00:27:45]	 This is my woman, these are my children, I hunt there, so forth and so on.
[00:27:45 - 00:27:52]	 It's this division of the world that allows the illusion of the ego to come into existence.
[00:27:52 - 00:27:59]	 Now, what do psychedelics do and why are they such social dynamite?
[00:27:59 - 00:28:04]	 The answer is it's not a health issue, it's not an addiction issue,
[00:28:04 - 00:28:10]	 it's not, I mean that's preposterous, it's about boundary dissolution.
[00:28:10 - 00:28:20]	 Every society from the classic Maya to Fujiwara, Japan to the France of the Bourbons,
[00:28:20 - 00:28:29]	 every society establishes a set of boundaries which it then calls reality and woe betide you
[00:28:29 - 00:28:35]	 if you go across the boundary because then you are outcast, outclassed, outlandish,
[00:28:35 - 00:28:39]	 and the full fury of the community can be turned against you,
[00:28:39 - 00:28:42]	 and we all know what that can mean as pagans.
[00:28:42 - 00:28:53]	 So, I believe that the ego is a dysfunctional psychic invader and that it will continue
[00:28:53 - 00:29:01]	 to strengthen and perpetuate itself as long as we do not institute either as groups
[00:29:01 - 00:29:08]	 or within our relationships or as individuals a regular ritual encounter
[00:29:08 - 00:29:13]	 with the forces which dissolve these boundaries.
[00:29:13 - 00:29:17]	 And the only force I know that works are these plants.
[00:29:17 - 00:29:23]	 And as I say, I'm not interested in arguing whether there are other methods or not,
[00:29:23 - 00:29:30]	 God I would hope so, but anything I ever looked into and I shopped the spiritual supermarket
[00:29:30 - 00:29:34]	 from stem to stern was horse shit as far as I could see.
[00:29:34 - 00:29:45]	 Now, I am not a sensitive, let me say that, people say well but what about Ramana Maharshi
[00:29:45 - 00:29:50]	 and what about Jakob Burma and hey, it's great for those folks.
[00:29:50 - 00:29:56]	 I applaud arhats and avatars and so forth and so on, but what I'm interested
[00:29:56 - 00:29:59]	 in is democratic extasis.
[00:29:59 - 00:30:04]	 It should be for the most lumpen among us.
[00:30:04 - 00:30:15]	 It is not to be attained by an act of dietary control, sexual abstinence or, you know, whatever.
[00:30:15 - 00:30:19]	 It should be, it is a human birth right.
[00:30:19 - 00:30:26]	 It is a human birth right to touch the incorporeal body of the goddess.
[00:30:26 - 00:30:27]	 It isn't something--
[00:30:27 - 00:30:38]	 [ Applause ]
[00:30:38 - 00:30:42]	 So, well let's see, where can we go from here?
[00:30:42 - 00:30:45]	 I say all this if you're interested.
[00:30:45 - 00:30:50]	 I say it better than I'm saying it here in my book Food of the Gods
[00:30:50 - 00:30:52]	 which was not written for you people.
[00:30:52 - 00:31:00]	 It's an argument for people who do not know a great deal about drugs, may never have taken drugs,
[00:31:00 - 00:31:04]	 but through some miracle have managed to maintain an open mind.
[00:31:04 - 00:31:15]	 All, you know, and I don't know how much you know about my shtick and I can't get into it now,
[00:31:15 - 00:31:22]	 but for me these things are more than tools for exploring the Freudian or Jungian unconscious.
[00:31:22 - 00:31:31]	 I mean, I journey to inhabited worlds that are, there are echoes in Elfland and Fay, but, you know,
[00:31:31 - 00:31:40]	 as a rationalist, as an aspiring astronautical engineer at age 13, it's astonishing to me
[00:31:40 - 00:31:46]	 that I could validate the mystery through doubt, through doubt.
[00:31:46 - 00:32:11]	 [ Music ]
[00:32:11 - 00:32:15]	 The truth does not require your belief.
[00:32:15 - 00:32:17]	 The truth is real.
[00:32:17 - 00:32:22]	 You can beat it on the ground, you can rip it apart, you can look inside it.
[00:32:22 - 00:32:26]	 Nobody needs to guard the truth from inspection.
[00:32:26 - 00:32:31]	 Nobody needs to tell you that, you know, you can't look behind the stage.
[00:32:31 - 00:32:40]	 And so my motivation is to try to, number one, bring people to the realization
[00:32:40 - 00:32:49]	 that the spiritual path, if you want to think of it that way, that is a real thing
[00:32:49 - 00:32:53]	 and it will carry you to the real thing.
[00:32:53 - 00:33:02]	 All spiritual disciplines that I know except for psychedelics put a great deal of emphasis
[00:33:02 - 00:33:04]	 on putting the pedal to the metal.
[00:33:05 - 00:33:14]	 Push, push, push, you know, meditate, make offerings, do Mantrayana, do Pranayama, do puja,
[00:33:14 - 00:33:16]	 push, push, push.
[00:33:16 - 00:33:22]	 With psychedelics, suddenly there's a very deep interest in where are the breaks.
[00:33:22 - 00:33:28]	 You see? You're no longer pushing.
[00:33:29 - 00:33:37]	 Once you get to the psychedelics, seeking is an attitude which ill becomes you.
[00:33:37 - 00:33:40]	 You have found it.
[00:33:40 - 00:33:42]	 You have found it.
[00:33:42 - 00:33:46]	 Now, what in the hell are you going to do with it?
[00:33:46 - 00:33:52]	 And this is a great dilemma for anyone who goes into this.
[00:33:52 - 00:33:59]	 I mean, I am-- as I see myself, I'm a preacher in the marketplace.
[00:34:00 - 00:34:08]	 But I know and I'm sure most of you know that I could walk out of here, you could walk out of here
[00:34:08 - 00:34:13]	 and you could go as far as your courage would carry you.
[00:34:13 - 00:34:15]	 There is no barrier.
[00:34:15 - 00:34:17]	 There are no more barriers.
[00:34:17 - 00:34:21]	 You can go as far as your fucking courage will carry you.
[00:34:21 - 00:34:24]	 And at that point, you have to ask the question, you know,
[00:34:24 - 00:34:29]	 do I want to be the mad monk of cold mountain?
[00:34:29 - 00:34:37]	 Do I want the villagers down in the valley to say, oh yes, we see him occasionally up in the mist,
[00:34:37 - 00:34:39]	 naked, flying with the eagles.
[00:34:39 - 00:34:45]	 Because you can be that person.
[00:34:45 - 00:34:52]	 You know, you don't have to go back to your job as ad exec, stock broker or whatever it is.
[00:34:52 - 00:34:58]	 And so, we stand on the edge of being able to leave history.
[00:34:58 - 00:34:59]	 We can leave it.
[00:34:59 - 00:35:07]	 You know, we tend to forget because our lives are so brief that what we call the psychedelic
[00:35:07 - 00:35:18]	 experience is very, very new on the plate of Western occultism and science.
[00:35:18 - 00:35:23]	 I mean, hashish did not make great inroads into medieval Europe.
[00:35:23 - 00:35:27]	 That all came later in the 18th and 19th century.
[00:35:27 - 00:35:30]	 Chloroform, ether, these things don't cut it.
[00:35:30 - 00:35:35]	 Mescaline was synthesized for the first time in 1888.
[00:35:35 - 00:35:39]	 These things had to compete with many other interesting areas
[00:35:39 - 00:35:42]	 of scientific exploration in the 20th century.
[00:35:42 - 00:35:48]	 We have not come to terms with what they mean and what they are.
[00:35:48 - 00:35:55]	 And it's a curious area because the counterculture, whatever that may mean,
[00:35:55 - 00:35:58]	 knows a great deal more about this than science.
[00:35:58 - 00:36:05]	 I mean, science does not explore this area because it senses enormous danger
[00:36:05 - 00:36:07]	 for its ontological machinery.
[00:36:07 - 00:36:10]	 It probably couldn't survive the encounter.
[00:36:10 - 00:36:16]	 And therefore, it's just said, well, it's psychology, it's marginal, it's fleeting,
[00:36:16 - 00:36:18]	 it's non-irreproducible and so forth and so on.
[00:36:18 - 00:36:21]	 This is all nonsense.
[00:36:21 - 00:36:29]	 You can, by unplugging the telephone, by fasting for six hours,
[00:36:29 - 00:36:35]	 and by taking five dried grams of Stropharycubensis in silent darkness,
[00:36:35 - 00:36:46]	 you can go up to the great simulacra of human explorers, Hypatia, Maria, Newton, Da Vinci.
[00:36:46 - 00:36:47]	 You can take that ride.
[00:36:47 - 00:36:51]	 I have the feeling that when we go into those psychedelic spaces,
[00:36:51 - 00:36:55]	 we not only see things no one has ever seen before,
[00:36:55 - 00:37:00]	 we see things no one will ever, ever see again.
[00:37:00 - 00:37:07]	 Okay, one last thought I want to put out and then I'll try for some questions.
[00:37:10 - 00:37:16]	 I have a sort of a rational mind in that I like things to make sense.
[00:37:16 - 00:37:22]	 I don't mean experimental sense, but I mean if you can build a verbal metaphor to get
[00:37:22 - 00:37:26]	 from one thing to another, then you understand it much better.
[00:37:26 - 00:37:31]	 And so, the magical dimension is real.
[00:37:31 - 00:37:33]	 It isn't psychological.
[00:37:33 - 00:37:37]	 It isn't based on the strength of will.
[00:37:37 - 00:37:40]	 It's as real as Mars in its orbit.
[00:37:40 - 00:37:44]	 I mean, there's real estate out there, folks.
[00:37:44 - 00:37:46]	 It's that real.
[00:37:46 - 00:37:53]	 And so then, the question becomes how to vivify it.
[00:37:53 - 00:37:58]	 And the answer is by creating a consensus in language.
[00:37:58 - 00:38:01]	 By having it made illegal.
[00:38:01 - 00:38:04]	 It's like where sex was with the Victorians.
[00:38:05 - 00:38:10]	 You know, everybody was inventing the wheel over and over again.
[00:38:10 - 00:38:17]	 What we have to do is begin to build a consensus about this realm.
[00:38:17 - 00:38:25]	 And, you know, this may be heresy in a community as oriented toward tradition
[00:38:25 - 00:38:27]	 as this one seems to be.
[00:38:28 - 00:38:37]	 But, and the generally pleasant position to take is that everybody has a piece of the action.
[00:38:37 - 00:38:40]	 You know, the Hasid's know something.
[00:38:40 - 00:38:42]	 The Buddhists know something.
[00:38:42 - 00:38:44]	 The Book of Mormon, there's something there.
[00:38:44 - 00:38:49]	 The mushroom was incredibly ungenerous on this point.
[00:38:49 - 00:38:55]	 It said nobody knows jack shit about what is going on.
[00:38:56 - 00:39:07]	 So, it is for you with your body as laboratory and your mind as worker in that laboratory
[00:39:07 - 00:39:12]	 to find the way to reflux the alchemical gold.
[00:39:12 - 00:39:18]	 The only experience which counts is your own experience.
[00:39:18 - 00:39:24]	 Everything else is somehow handed down through social structures and political structures.
[00:39:24 - 00:39:26]	 It's irrelevant.
[00:39:26 - 00:39:31]	 If flying saucers were to land on the south lawn of the White House tomorrow,
[00:39:31 - 00:39:39]	 it would not matter to you as much as smoking DMT would if you did that tonight
[00:39:39 - 00:39:45]	 because that's your experience, your conviction, you see.
[00:39:45 - 00:39:52]	 And I believe that the rebirth of paganism, the rebirth of archaism,
[00:39:52 - 00:40:00]	 the rebirth of psychedelic shamanism is coming at this moment because we are going
[00:40:00 - 00:40:07]	 to be involved in a historical meltdown which will be the equivalent
[00:40:07 - 00:40:15]	 of a species deep shamanic crisis in which as a collectivity, we are going to have
[00:40:15 - 00:40:19]	 to make the journey to the well of worlds and recover
[00:40:20 - 00:40:23]	 and cleanse the collective soul of humanity.
[00:40:23 - 00:40:30]	 We have lost touch with our moral compass because we have lost touch with the Gaian mind.
[00:40:30 - 00:40:33]	 And this is not a metaphor.
[00:40:33 - 00:40:40]	 If you take these neurotransmitters, these exopheramones that connect you
[00:40:40 - 00:40:46]	 up with the natural environment, the Gaian intent becomes known.
[00:40:46 - 00:40:48]	 It's an act of feeling.
[00:40:49 - 00:40:54]	 If we could feel what we are doing, we would stop doing it.
[00:40:54 - 00:41:03]	 But we live in a realm of abstraction, excuses, incredible wealth, incredible levels
[00:41:03 - 00:41:10]	 of pampering and softness lie between us, the upper 5% of the intellectual
[00:41:10 - 00:41:15]	 and material elite on the planet and the problems.
[00:41:15 - 00:41:20]	 I mean, how many of us have been to Bosnia or Rwanda or Somalia?
[00:41:20 - 00:41:26]	 These things are only images on a dehumanizing screen.
[00:41:26 - 00:41:34]	 If we could feel what we are doing, we would awaken to the mystery of each other
[00:41:34 - 00:41:42]	 and to the mystery of the historical process of recovering what was lost.
[00:41:42 - 00:41:45]	 We don't need this material civilization.
[00:41:45 - 00:41:50]	 We don't need 5 billion people on this planet.
[00:41:50 - 00:41:56]	 We have to think very, very radically about how we are going to change ourselves
[00:41:56 - 00:41:59]	 or we are not going to make the cut.
[00:41:59 - 00:42:04]	 And orthodoxy is utterly and completely bankrupt.
[00:42:04 - 00:42:07]	 All it can do is suppress.
[00:42:07 - 00:42:10]	 They suppress, they suppress, they suppress.
[00:42:11 - 00:42:18]	 But there's only one argument that will forgive suppression, deliverance.
[00:42:18 - 00:42:21]	 And they can't give us deliverance.
[00:42:21 - 00:42:33]	 All they can give us is the Menendez trial, OJ, Baby M, the skaters, Klaus von Bülow,
[00:42:33 - 00:42:36]	 horse shit, horse shit, horse shit.
[00:42:36 - 00:42:38]	 We are locked inside--
[00:42:38 - 00:42:41]	 [ Applause ]
[00:42:41 - 00:42:48]	 -- a nightmare, a nightmare of contaminated and toxic imagery that is designed
[00:42:48 - 00:42:52]	 to disempower you and make it impossible for you to think straight.
[00:42:52 - 00:42:59]	 And the way out is straight back to the reality of the vegetable gnosis.
[00:42:59 - 00:43:01]	 It is there.
[00:43:01 - 00:43:02]	 It has always been there.
[00:43:03 - 00:43:10]	 The societies that never broke the connection live in dynamic and loving balance
[00:43:10 - 00:43:15]	 with each other and the planet today were it not for the input
[00:43:15 - 00:43:19]	 of our disruptive social and economic systems.
[00:43:19 - 00:43:27]	 So, I talk to all kinds of people who I see as part of my community.
[00:43:28 - 00:43:38]	 But it stretches from virtual reality to the radical gay movement to the house movement
[00:43:38 - 00:43:45]	 to the pagan movement to the younger molecular pharmacologists
[00:43:45 - 00:43:50]	 to the radical art historians and psychotherapists.
[00:43:50 - 00:43:57]	 All of these communities are fragmented and suspicious of each other
[00:43:58 - 00:44:02]	 and this is precisely what orthodoxy enjoys.
[00:44:02 - 00:44:08]	 If all of these countercultural impulses could make common cause,
[00:44:08 - 00:44:15]	 we would probably discover that we're 65 to 70 percent of the population.
[00:44:15 - 00:44:23]	 And so, what is needed is a spirit of boundary dissolution between individuals,
[00:44:23 - 00:44:31]	 between classes, sexual orientations, rich and poor, man and woman,
[00:44:31 - 00:44:36]	 intellectual and feeling-toned types.
[00:44:36 - 00:44:41]	 If this can happen, then we will make a new world.
[00:44:41 - 00:44:49]	 And if this doesn't happen, nature is fairly pitiless and has a place for us in the shale
[00:44:49 - 00:44:54]	 of this planet where so many have preceded us.
[00:44:54 - 00:44:57]	 Well, I think that's the basic rave.
[00:44:57 - 00:44:59]	 It raises a lot of issues.
[00:44:59 - 00:45:05]	 If somebody is burning to ask a question, yes, burning to ask.
[00:45:05 - 00:45:16]	 [ Inaudible Remark ]
[00:45:16 - 00:45:24]	 Well, I think that it's very hard to find pristine, quote, pseudo-paleolithic
[00:45:24 - 00:45:26]	 or pseudo-neolithic culture.
[00:45:26 - 00:45:34]	 Even the Amazon where I've spent a lot of time, tribes that were nomadic at the time
[00:45:34 - 00:45:44]	 of contact are now agriculturalists simply because missionary medicine has swollen aboriginal
[00:45:44 - 00:45:50]	 populations to the point where they can't be nomads as they used to be.
[00:45:50 - 00:45:51]	 So, you're right.
[00:45:51 - 00:45:58]	 There are some psychedelic using cultures that are pretty unappealing,
[00:45:58 - 00:46:02]	 although actually I can only think of one that I find politically very unappealing
[00:46:02 - 00:46:07]	 and I don't want to knock them because I haven't lived with them, so I may be misled.
[00:46:07 - 00:46:15]	 But I think that it's not simply to take psychedelics but it's also to decondition oneself
[00:46:15 - 00:46:23]	 to the notion of ego and all the concepts which constellate around that such as place,
[00:46:23 - 00:46:27]	 property, ownership, and stability.
[00:46:27 - 00:46:32]	 You see, the idea that we have inherited from Western religion
[00:46:32 - 00:46:37]	 and science is the idea that things should be stable.
[00:46:37 - 00:46:46]	 This is a very male dominant notion, the wish for stability, eternity, when in fact,
[00:46:46 - 00:46:53]	 the message life hands you over and over again is nothing lasts.
[00:46:53 - 00:46:55]	 Nothing lasts.
[00:46:55 - 00:47:01]	 Not what you love, not what you hate, not your enemies, your friends,
[00:47:01 - 00:47:04]	 not even your dear, dear self, nothing lasts.
[00:47:05 - 00:47:09]	 And the ego goes mad in the presence of that truth.
[00:47:09 - 00:47:12]	 It can't swallow it.
[00:47:12 - 00:47:18]	 And so we have anxiety of death, need to dominate people, need to possess property,
[00:47:18 - 00:47:26]	 terror of illness, resentment to fate because we are not in the flow.
[00:47:26 - 00:47:33]	 And I think what these psychedelics do is they put you very much in the here and now
[00:47:34 - 00:47:37]	 and it's nothing more than that.
[00:47:37 - 00:47:40]	 I mean, obviously, I'm an egghead and an abstract thinker and I hope
[00:47:40 - 00:47:43]	 to make my reputation in mathematics.
[00:47:43 - 00:47:49]	 But feeling is the primary validator of existence.
[00:47:49 - 00:47:53]	 I mean, if you don't know that, you got to go back to square one.
[00:47:53 - 00:47:56]	 And these things empower feeling.
[00:47:56 - 00:47:58]	 They are catalysts for the imagination.
[00:47:58 - 00:48:02]	 I mean, you may not like what psychedelics do to you.
[00:48:02 - 00:48:04]	 They may terrify you.
[00:48:04 - 00:48:09]	 But if it terrifies you, then surely it must have catalyzed your imagination
[00:48:09 - 00:48:12]	 or you wouldn't have known that terror.
[00:48:12 - 00:48:19]	 So catalysis of the imagination in a fairly loving and yet ruthless way is what the
[00:48:19 - 00:48:20]	 psychedelics deliver.
[00:48:20 - 00:48:25]	 Anybody who calls this escapism is sitting on their thumb.
[00:48:25 - 00:48:28]	 I mean, they don't know what they're talking about.
[00:48:28 - 00:48:31]	 Reality is for people who can't handle this stuff.
[00:48:31 - 00:48:37]	 [ Applause ]
[00:48:37 - 00:48:40]	 I do want to say one thing.
[00:48:40 - 00:48:41]	 It almost slipped my mind.
[00:48:41 - 00:48:44]	 And for those of you who have your hands up, I apologize.
[00:48:44 - 00:48:46]	 But I think this needs to be said.
[00:48:46 - 00:48:48]	 And I don't know how many of you know it.
[00:48:48 - 00:48:54]	 But this comes under the-- this is a news flash, folks.
[00:48:54 - 00:48:59]	 We interrupt this program to bring you a special announcement.
[00:48:59 - 00:49:05]	 A new psychoactive substance has been discovered.
[00:49:05 - 00:49:10]	 A very powerful psychoactive substance.
[00:49:10 - 00:49:14]	 The most powerful since the discovery of LSD.
[00:49:14 - 00:49:21]	 A substance so powerful that 300 micrograms is the dose.
[00:49:21 - 00:49:25]	 That means 1 gram will dose 7,000 people.
[00:49:27 - 00:49:30]	 This compound comes from a plant.
[00:49:30 - 00:49:33]	 The plant is-- and I hope you're paying attention.
[00:49:33 - 00:49:36]	 The plant is legal.
[00:49:36 - 00:49:39]	 The compound is legal.
[00:49:39 - 00:49:41]	 You can possess it.
[00:49:41 - 00:49:44]	 You can manufacture it.
[00:49:44 - 00:49:48]	 You can transport it across borders.
[00:49:48 - 00:49:50]	 You can give it away.
[00:49:50 - 00:49:51]	 You can sell it.
[00:49:51 - 00:49:53]	 And you can do it on stage.
[00:49:55 - 00:49:57]	 And it comes from a plant.
[00:49:57 - 00:50:02]	 And the plant is also available.
[00:50:02 - 00:50:04]	 And I want to tell you about this because--
[00:50:04 - 00:50:07]	 [ Laughter ]
[00:50:07 - 00:50:09]	 Okay. No shoving.
[00:50:09 - 00:50:10]	 No shoving.
[00:50:10 - 00:50:15]	 [ Laughter ]
[00:50:15 - 00:50:16]	 All right.
[00:50:16 - 00:50:18]	 Not to keep you in suspense any longer.
[00:50:18 - 00:50:21]	 The plant is salvia divinorum.
[00:50:21 - 00:50:24]	 Salvia divinorum.
[00:50:24 - 00:50:29]	 Which some of you who are real mavens of this stuff know it.
[00:50:29 - 00:50:32]	 It's been in the books for 30 years.
[00:50:32 - 00:50:35]	 The problem was nobody knew how to get off.
[00:50:35 - 00:50:41]	 And so it was always carried in these lists as suspect hallucinogen.
[00:50:41 - 00:50:45]	 The thing is any scientist confronted with a plant
[00:50:45 - 00:50:49]	 where somebody says it's a hallucinogen will test to see if it's an alkaloid.
[00:50:50 - 00:50:54]	 All hallucinogens, almost all, are alkaloids.
[00:50:54 - 00:50:58]	 So salvia divinorum, negative for alkaloids.
[00:50:58 - 00:51:00]	 Doesn't matter.
[00:51:00 - 00:51:08]	 It has a new unknown compound in it, now known salvorine alpha.
[00:51:08 - 00:51:12]	 And the interesting thing about salvorine alpha is we have
[00:51:12 - 00:51:17]	 in this country what's called a structural near relatives or Kojner Law.
[00:51:17 - 00:51:25]	 Which says if a compound is a structural near relative isomer and antiomer
[00:51:25 - 00:51:32]	 or stereo isomer of an illegal compound, then it too can be made illegal.
[00:51:32 - 00:51:37]	 Salvia divinorum doesn't fit this description.
[00:51:37 - 00:51:43]	 That means that in order to make this stuff illegal, the government will have
[00:51:43 - 00:51:47]	 to present medical data showing there is something wrong with it.
[00:51:47 - 00:51:54]	 And at this stage, nobody on earth knows the real pharmacological parameters
[00:51:54 - 00:51:56]	 of this compound.
[00:51:56 - 00:51:57]	 So here's the deal.
[00:51:57 - 00:52:04]	 You can grow this plant in a window box, in your apartment, in your backyard.
[00:52:04 - 00:52:06]	 It looks like Joe Plant.
[00:52:06 - 00:52:13]	 There is nothing particularly distinguishing about this plant.
[00:52:14 - 00:52:18]	 And if you have three or four cuttings in six or seven months,
[00:52:18 - 00:52:21]	 you will have more than you know what to do with.
[00:52:21 - 00:52:25]	 And then I'll just describe how I do it.
[00:52:25 - 00:52:31]	 I have not -- I'm slightly chickenshit to do the pure compound, which by the way,
[00:52:31 - 00:52:32]	 you do 300 micrograms.
[00:52:32 - 00:52:38]	 Understand that what that looks like is a grain of salt.
[00:52:38 - 00:52:44]	 A small grain of salt is a human effective dose.
[00:52:44 - 00:52:49]	 It comes on so fast that you have no impression of it coming on at all.
[00:52:49 - 00:52:55]	 You do it, and then after a while, you notice that for a long time,
[00:52:55 - 00:52:58]	 you have been staring at something incomprehensible.
[00:52:58 - 00:53:08]	 Well, let me -- here's how I recommend that you do it while we get the chemical things
[00:53:08 - 00:53:11]	 sorted out because the chemical, it could be dangerous.
[00:53:11 - 00:53:15]	 It would be very easy to overdose by a factor of 10, 20, 30,
[00:53:15 - 00:53:18]	 and you would still just be doing a smidgen.
[00:53:18 - 00:53:21]	 So I say let's honor the plants.
[00:53:21 - 00:53:29]	 Let's not hand the government a bunch of casualties that it can clock over and put
[00:53:29 - 00:53:33]	 on national TV, you know, the Bibble, Bibble, Bibble show.
[00:53:33 - 00:53:37]	 Let's use the plant.
[00:53:37 - 00:53:43]	 And the way you do it is you grow up a batch of this stuff and get between 15 and 20 leaves.
[00:53:43 - 00:53:48]	 Remove the mid-vein with your fingernail just to lower the mass.
[00:53:48 - 00:53:52]	 Fold it all into a little pile.
[00:53:52 - 00:53:57]	 Put it in your mouth, and 20 leaves is a whopping mouthful.
[00:53:57 - 00:54:00]	 So basically as much as you can get in your mouth, put it in your mouth,
[00:54:00 - 00:54:06]	 lie down in silent darkness, and squeeze this stuff with your jaws.
[00:54:07 - 00:54:09]	 It tastes like it's horrible.
[00:54:09 - 00:54:12]	 It's not as bad as ayahuasca, but it's horrible.
[00:54:12 - 00:54:15]	 But you could acquire a taste for it.
[00:54:15 - 00:54:24]	 So lie down in darkness where you can see a digital watch,
[00:54:24 - 00:54:31]	 one of these red flashing jobs like a Kmart deal, and then let it --
[00:54:32 - 00:54:38]	 don't swallow it, but just squeeze it and masticate it at 15 minutes by the clock.
[00:54:38 - 00:54:44]	 Spit it out into a bowl or a Kleenex or something, and then just lie there.
[00:54:44 - 00:54:48]	 Lie still in the darkness with your eyes closed and look --
[00:54:48 - 00:54:52]	 and this is almost the key empowerment, though it's idiotic.
[00:54:52 - 00:54:53]	 People fail to do it.
[00:54:53 - 00:54:59]	 Look at the back of your eyelids with the expectation of seeing something.
[00:54:59 - 00:55:02]	 And when you do that, after just three or four minutes,
[00:55:02 - 00:55:07]	 there will be what we professionals call streaming,
[00:55:07 - 00:55:13]	 which means amoeboid lights of after-image colors,
[00:55:13 - 00:55:15]	 the chartreuse and purple flowing by.
[00:55:15 - 00:55:20]	 And about three minutes after that, it will deepen very, very quickly
[00:55:20 - 00:55:29]	 into extraordinarily bizarre, dare we say it, fairly DMT-like hallucinations.
[00:55:30 - 00:55:36]	 And it builds fast, I mean so fast that there is this wonderful moment in it
[00:55:36 - 00:55:43]	 where you actually know real fear, which shows you that it's working.
[00:55:43 - 00:55:47]	 I mean, I really believe if you take a psychedelic
[00:55:47 - 00:55:52]	 and you're not afraid you did too much, you didn't do enough.
[00:55:52 - 00:55:59]	 [ Applause ]
[00:55:59 - 00:56:07]	 The experience then will unfold over about 45 minutes and just lie there and look.
[00:56:07 - 00:56:09]	 And it is beautiful.
[00:56:09 - 00:56:10]	 It is beautiful.
[00:56:10 - 00:56:13]	 I mean, I'm a connoisseur of hallucination.
[00:56:13 - 00:56:21]	 And the beautiful -- these deep indigo blues, these cerulean blues against blackness
[00:56:21 - 00:56:29]	 that are like neon and these amorphous Eve Tanguy kind of shapes that are moving
[00:56:29 - 00:56:32]	 and transforming themselves, I mean, I was amazed.
[00:56:32 - 00:56:33]	 I couldn't believe it.
[00:56:33 - 00:56:35]	 I was saying, my God, this is legal.
[00:56:35 - 00:56:37]	 This is legal.
[00:56:37 - 00:56:38]	 And it's working.
[00:56:38 - 00:56:40]	 It's working.
[00:56:40 - 00:56:44]	 And I am the hardest of the hard heads.
[00:56:44 - 00:56:49]	 I mean, I know people say, you know, here's tigadis lucidum, this will get you off.
[00:56:49 - 00:56:55]	 Here's this, smoke this, knick-a-knick this, something -- no, no, no, no.
[00:56:55 - 00:56:57]	 No, it doesn't -- it's not like that.
[00:56:57 - 00:56:58]	 These things are rare.
[00:56:58 - 00:57:00]	 But this one works.
[00:57:00 - 00:57:07]	 And I commend it to your attention and your friend's attention and anyone with shamanic intent.
[00:57:07 - 00:57:11]	 As I say, it's perfectly legal to possess, advocate the whole bit, yes.
[00:57:11 - 00:57:11]	 >> Salvia.
[00:57:11 - 00:57:11]	 >> Salvia.
[00:57:11 - 00:57:16]	 It's in the genus Salvia.
[00:57:16 - 00:57:20]	 That's the mint family, sacred to pagans for millennia.
[00:57:20 - 00:57:23]	 Salvia, S-A-L-V-I-A.
[00:57:23 - 00:57:30]	 And then divinorum, D-I-V-I-N-O-R-U-M, the diviners mint.
[00:57:30 - 00:57:36]	 There's -- well, yes, let me say something about this that's very interesting.
[00:57:36 - 00:57:37]	 >> What's its common name?
[00:57:37 - 00:57:37]	 >> Pardon me?
[00:57:37 - 00:57:38]	 >> What's its common name?
[00:57:38 - 00:57:41]	 >> Well, that's what I was going to talk about.
[00:57:41 - 00:57:46]	 It's native from Mexico, so it has no common name in English.
[00:57:46 - 00:57:51]	 In Spanish, it has a very interesting common name.
[00:57:51 - 00:57:54]	 It's called Ojos de la Pastora.
[00:57:54 - 00:57:58]	 Now, the eyes of the shepherdess.
[00:57:58 - 00:58:01]	 What a strange name.
[00:58:01 - 00:58:02]	 Think about it for a moment.
[00:58:02 - 00:58:09]	 First of all, notice that in Christian iconography, there are no shepherdesses, period.
[00:58:09 - 00:58:11]	 Not one. We got shepherdesses.
[00:58:11 - 00:58:14]	 Shepherds, you got your shepherds there, Christmas.
[00:58:14 - 00:58:15]	 Not shepherdess.
[00:58:15 - 00:58:18]	 No. So it's called Ojos de la Pastora.
[00:58:18 - 00:58:22]	 Well, then the anthropologist who studied this, Brett Blosser,
[00:58:22 - 00:58:25]	 to whom we all owe a great debt, hail Brett.
[00:58:25 - 00:58:31]	 Naturally, these people are Tzotzil and Sotil.
[00:58:31 - 00:58:33]	 They're in the mountains of Oaxaca.
[00:58:33 - 00:58:38]	 And so he said to them, well, yes, Ojos de la Pastora, very interesting,
[00:58:38 - 00:58:40]	 but what do you call it in your language?
[00:58:40 - 00:58:42]	 What do you call it in Tzotzil?
[00:58:42 - 00:58:48]	 And they said, well, we have no name for it in our language.
[00:58:48 - 00:58:51]	 This is very, very interesting.
[00:58:51 - 00:58:57]	 And if any of you have any thoughts or want to work on this, it's inconceivable
[00:58:57 - 00:59:03]	 if these people had used this for centuries that they would not have a local Tzotzil name for it.
[00:59:03 - 00:59:05]	 So he said, why don't you have a name for it?
[00:59:06 - 00:59:11]	 And they said, because our grandfathers were the first to use it.
[00:59:11 - 00:59:19]	 And this, we do not know what to make of it, because Salvia Divinorum is known only
[00:59:19 - 00:59:25]	 from this very indemnified locality in the Sierra Mazateca.
[00:59:25 - 00:59:27]	 Where did it come from?
[00:59:27 - 00:59:30]	 Has it always been there?
[00:59:30 - 00:59:33]	 But these Indians only discovered it 200 years ago?
[00:59:33 - 00:59:36]	 Did it come from somewhere else?
[00:59:36 - 00:59:37]	 And if so, where?
[00:59:37 - 00:59:41]	 Because it's never been located anywhere else on the planet.
[00:59:41 - 00:59:44]	 So this is a great puzzlement.
[00:59:44 - 00:59:52]	 And I think if we move fast enough, we psychedelicos, we pagans, we neuronauts, we magicians,
[00:59:52 - 00:59:56]	 if we move fast enough, this will just be moot.
[00:59:56 - 01:00:00]	 And this is a far more powerful thing than cannabis.
[01:00:00 - 01:00:04]	 I mean, not if you've never smoked cannabis and then you sit down
[01:00:04 - 01:00:06]	 and smoke the best aft there is.
[01:00:06 - 01:00:11]	 But as we all know, after a while, cannabis loses its ability
[01:00:11 - 01:00:14]	 to really catapult you into the unspeakable.
[01:00:14 - 01:00:21]	 The Salvia Divinorum, every time I have taken it, it's gotten better and stronger and weirder.
[01:00:21 - 01:00:27]	 So I think it is sent from the goddess at this time, eyes of the shepherdess.
[01:00:27 - 01:00:30]	 These are the eyes we should be looking through.
[01:00:30 - 01:00:37]	 [ Applause ]
[01:00:37 - 01:00:40]	 I think several people at once asked, "Where do you get it?"
[01:00:40 - 01:00:46]	 You must each have your own favorite rare plant dealer.
[01:00:46 - 01:00:52]	 I don't work for any rare plant dealer and every time I mention one,
[01:00:52 - 01:00:57]	 thousands of dollars flow into their coffers which leaves me feeling slightly weird.
[01:00:57 - 01:01:05]	 Nevertheless, of the jungle, PO Box 1801, Sebastopol, California.
[01:01:05 - 01:01:11]	 Somebody sitting next to you already knows this so I'm not going to repeat it.
[01:01:11 - 01:01:12]	 That's the one.
[01:01:12 - 01:01:12]	 And--
[01:01:12 - 01:01:17]	 [ Inaudible Remark ]
[01:01:17 - 01:01:19]	 A harvesting question.
[01:01:20 - 01:01:41]	 [ Inaudible Remark ]
[01:01:41 - 01:01:43]	 Well, we're learning.
[01:01:43 - 01:01:44]	 We're learning.
[01:01:45 - 01:01:51]	 And so far, we've been fairly careful to eat it just as it's approaching flowering.
[01:01:51 - 01:01:53]	 [ Inaudible Remark ]
[01:01:53 - 01:01:59]	 Right. But you do know, don't you, that it may look like an annual but it's a perennial.
[01:01:59 - 01:02:04]	 You can clip it off above a node and it will grow more.
[01:02:04 - 01:02:11]	 [ Inaudible Remark ]
[01:02:11 - 01:02:15]	 Yeah, no, seed is a pain, is a pain.
[01:02:15 - 01:02:16]	 Try and do it with cutting.
[01:02:16 - 01:02:18]	 That's about all I can say about it.
[01:02:18 - 01:02:21]	 All right, I'm going to knock off.
[01:02:21 - 01:02:22]	 Thank you very much.
[01:02:23 - 01:02:45]	 [ Applause ]
[01:02:45 - 01:02:58]	 [ Music ]
[01:02:58 - 01:03:13]	 [ Music ]
[01:03:13 - 01:03:32]	 [ Music ]
[01:03:32 - 01:03:59]	 [ Music ]
[01:04:00 - 01:04:06]	 [ Silence ]