[00:00:00 - 00:00:13]	 When Darwin developed the theory of evolution in the 19th century, English intellectual society was under the sway of Christianity.
[00:00:13 - 00:00:33]	 And it was possible as recently as 150 years ago to claim yourself to be an intellectual and to actually maintain in polite society that the earth was created by God at 9 a.m. on September the 4th, 2004 BC.
[00:00:33 - 00:00:43]	 150 years ago in England, people believed this with perfect confidence that they were at the cutting edge of intellectual understanding.
[00:00:43 - 00:01:02]	 Well, Darwin wanted to overcome deism, which was this all-pervasive belief in an interventionist creator who was literally guiding the flight of every atom and the fall of every leaf.
[00:01:02 - 00:01:18]	 And Darwin said, "We don't need this kind of invasive deistic plenum. Let's just take the process of mutation, a random process driven by he knew not what."
[00:01:18 - 00:01:32]	 We now know largely driven by incidental cosmic radiation reaching the surface of the earth. Let's take mutation and natural selection, another random process.
[00:01:32 - 00:01:46]	 And when we run these two random processes head on, lo and behold, outcome flamingos, cockroaches, hummingbirds, coral reefs, palm trees, and ourselves.
[00:01:46 - 00:02:04]	 But I think that and, you know, he's the co-discoverer of evolution who, if I believed in reincarnation, I would claim him as my own, Alfred Russell Wallace, was unable to agree with Darwin.
[00:02:04 - 00:02:22]	 And he said, "No, that accounts for minor change in organisms, natural selection, but how can you use those processes to account for something like, for instance, the metamorphosis of insects?"
[00:02:22 - 00:02:40]	 A caterpillar changing into a butterfly involves the chemical coordination of hundreds, if not thousands of genes doing a perfectly integrated and flawless ballet of transformation.
[00:02:40 - 00:02:57]	 How incrementally could you ever get a situation where a caterpillar undergoes mutation into a butterfly unless there is some third factor at work in evolution?
[00:02:57 - 00:03:12]	 And Wallace thought that it was an appetition, an appetite, a tendency toward an end state. And that compass notion of evolution means that you're steering toward a goal.
[00:03:12 - 00:03:33]	 Now, in common speech, when we use the word evolution, we usually mean this. But orthodox biologists, I remember when I was studying evolution, I had a professor who said, "Do not use the word evolution unless you are talking about a process involving genes."
[00:03:33 - 00:03:47]	 In other words, don't talk about the evolution of the novel or of abstract expressionism or the evolution of society or the evolution of a political viewpoint. This is all bad thinking.
[00:03:47 - 00:04:04]	 Well, people like Ilya Prigozhin, Wes Churchman, Eric Yanch have reclaimed evolution as the notion of progressive motion, movement toward higher and higher states of development.
[00:04:04 - 00:04:17]	 But 19th century evolutionists refused to talk about advanced and less advanced or higher and lower when they talked about evolution. They just saw it as a random process playing itself out.
[00:04:17 - 00:04:38]	 I don't think so. I think we are called that nature is hyperdimensional in its architectonics and that we are flowing toward a culminating purpose, probably the shedding of matter as the vehicle of our becoming.
[00:04:38 - 00:04:58]	 I just wanted to ask you a question about, do you think the information that is contained in psilocybin, DMT, all the hallucinogenics, do you think that the information is self-contained or is it actually more of just a way of tuning our brains into a more cosmic frequency that exists?
[00:04:58 - 00:05:08]	 In the psilocybin or is the psilocybin just a mediator to a drastic way of tuning into a more cosmic broadcast?
[00:05:08 - 00:05:24]	 Well, it's hard for me to imagine that it could be in the psilocybin because psilocybin is a very simple molecule. I mean, it's a small molecule. It's a planar molecule.
[00:05:24 - 00:05:42]	 It seems to me what must be happening is that we are embedded in an ocean of information and psilocybin somehow changes our channel slightly.
[00:05:42 - 00:06:02]	 You know, ordinary consciousness is created by a neurotransmitter called serotonin, 5-hydroxytryptamine, suggestively a very close relative of psilocybin and DMT.
[00:06:02 - 00:06:24]	 And it seems to me, I think I mentioned this a little bit in the talk last night, that we have evolved a neurotransmitter which has the effect of narrowing the focus of consciousness to what is operationally defined by the body as the here and now.
[00:06:24 - 00:06:44]	 In other words, the body is very fragile and site-dependent and must be protected from high levels of radiation, inundation by toxic or life-threatening chemicals like water.
[00:06:44 - 00:07:07]	 I mean, you don't want to have the ocean wash over you or it's a problem. But that these pseudo neurotransmitters, which are hallucinogens, have not been integrated into normal metabolism because they don't serve the body's need to preserve itself.
[00:07:07 - 00:07:19]	 But what they do serve is an expansion of mental function. And it may be, you know, that these neurotransmitters are in the act of evolving.
[00:07:19 - 00:07:38]	 We no longer need to fear the immediate environment. Well, maybe that's a cheerful overstatement. But one would like to think that we no longer need to fear the immediate environment as much as we did when we were locked in competition with other animal species.
[00:07:38 - 00:07:54]	 Now, it's to me highly suggestive, the fact that we contain and metabolize DMT in the course of ordinary metabolism.
[00:07:54 - 00:08:19]	 What does it mean that the most powerful of all psychedelic hallucinogens is a part of normal human metabolism? The pineal gland, whose function is very mysterious, is doing a lot of chemistry that looks like psychedelic chemistry.
[00:08:19 - 00:08:42]	 It's elaborating harm mean like beta carbolines. So it's possible that literally, when we take these tryptamine hallucinogens, we are, as it were, dressing up in the mental furniture of the distant future.
[00:08:42 - 00:09:02]	 That we are experiencing a state of consciousness toward which we are naturally evolving. And that over time and through natural selection, the serotonergic neurotransmitters are making way for these more powerful psychedelic compounds.
[00:09:02 - 00:09:29]	 And this, and the fact that, well, something like imagination looks to me like a self-generated internal involvement with compounds, which at some point in the future might replace the compounds of ordinary metabolism and shift our mental life literally into another dimension.
[00:09:29 - 00:09:39]	 Yeah.
[00:09:39 - 00:09:50]	 Uses organic psychedelics for a period of time as a daily dietary supplement, like every day for an extended period of time. Nobody really talks about that.
[00:09:50 - 00:09:52]	 How much do you use?
[00:09:52 - 00:09:55]	 A gram, a gram and a half.
[00:09:55 - 00:10:23]	 Yes. Well, one can do that. I sort of I've sort of thought that maybe this isn't such a good idea because I'm I'm interested more in spectacular episodes of intoxication with the exception of cannabis, of course, rather than integrating it as a lifestyle.
[00:10:23 - 00:10:28]	 I'm the only one who's doing this as a lifestyle. I feel really alone right now.
[00:10:28 - 00:10:57]	 Well, is there anybody who wants to join this gentleman in his isolation? I at times I've done that, but I found it to be well, here's the thing. You have to get the dose. The dose is very critical.
[00:10:57 - 00:10:59]	 And I think that's a very important point.
[00:10:59 - 00:11:27]	 And I think that's a very important point.
[00:11:27 - 00:11:39]	 It's very important for me to dip into these places and then to get out, towel off and think about it.
[00:11:39 - 00:12:04]	 However, you know, there is a there is a streak of the chicken shit in me, I think if you if you really want to leave us all behind and you know, bourgeois values and your job and Bill Clinton and the ozone hole and all of that behind.
[00:12:04 - 00:12:16]	 If you start taking psilocybin, let's say four grams every three days, I guarantee you within a month, there will be very few people that you will have much in common with.
[00:12:16 - 00:12:38]	 And you will be very happy. You will be very happy with your circumstance. Generally, I think. But you will have evolved a point of view, a set of values and expectation that most people will find a lot of difficulty relating to.
[00:12:38 - 00:12:49]	 So if you're looking at a room shape, let's say fresh fruit ice, a gram, you're looking at what, maybe three to five hours of time involved with.
[00:12:49 - 00:12:55]	 So that means 20 hours left in the day to do everything else you need to do.
[00:12:55 - 00:12:58]	 I mean, you do know that. What is the dose again?
[00:12:58 - 00:13:13]	 Huh. Well, I don't know. See, it may be just a matter of personal styles. When I take psilocybin, I give it one hundred and ten percent of my attention.
[00:13:13 - 00:13:22]	 So I can't do it and work at the computer or make phone calls or shop or deliver my children to lessons and stuff like that.
[00:13:22 - 00:13:37]	 And so my idea with it is to completely come down between doses and then, you know, you're a virgin again.
[00:13:37 - 00:13:42]	 Yeah. Do you keep you don't keep hallucinating? No, it becomes something else.
[00:13:42 - 00:13:55]	 See, I don't want you to feel PA, but I think that what people do with drugs, that is probably a bad idea, is they take too little too often.
[00:13:55 - 00:14:03]	 And that the best way to do drugs is to take very challenging doses. Rarely.
[00:14:03 - 00:14:15]	 I mean, I used to say to my groups, if you haven't taken enough that you think you may have done too much, then you did too little.
[00:14:15 - 00:14:23]	 In other words, you really want to dissolve the boundary. You don't want to integrate it into this world.
[00:14:23 - 00:14:31]	 You want to have an experience which you can then integrate into this world after the trip.
[00:14:31 - 00:14:35]	 You know, it always talks about language and thought processes.
[00:14:35 - 00:14:44]	 And I feel as though most of my best work is under that period of one to one and a half grams of dosage.
[00:14:44 - 00:14:52]	 And I just don't understand how, you know, the recommended experience is much more than what I'm doing, obviously.
[00:14:52 - 00:15:00]	 Well, have you taken large doses? Well, isn't that much more interesting?
[00:15:00 - 00:15:06]	 I guess it comes down to what it is you're looking to do while you're doing it. It's not a matter of interesting.
[00:15:06 - 00:15:12]	 It's a matter of what your purpose is, what your intent is, what your trip is.
[00:15:12 - 00:15:17]	 Well, at these higher doses, you can't do anything. Of course, that's my point.
[00:15:17 - 00:15:26]	 You know, I mean, you lie, you're hanging on to the floor is a major program to be executed.
[00:15:26 - 00:15:33]	 Yeah. Can you exist in the parallel universe? Can a person exist in the parallel universe?
[00:15:33 - 00:15:38]	 You mean for days and days? Yeah. I mean, could you live?
[00:15:38 - 00:15:54]	 You can live, but you alarm your friends and quickly become an object of community concern because, you know, for ordinary people, you are what is called nuts.
[00:15:54 - 00:16:03]	 And doesn't the experience become a type of a three dimensional TV? I mean, you just listen to it.
[00:16:03 - 00:16:12]	 No, I think you underestimate how strange it is. I don't think you could ever get used to these places.
[00:16:12 - 00:16:17]	 You know, sometimes people ask me if if DMT is dangerous.
[00:16:17 - 00:16:30]	 And the honest answer is only if you fear death by astonishment and death by astonishment is a real danger in these places.
[00:16:30 - 00:16:41]	 I mean, these places are not simply strange or amazing or highly peculiar. They are absolutely confounding.
[00:16:41 - 00:16:51]	 I mean, that's what I'm trying to get across is this is not some this is not going to require just some minor adjustment of our worldview.
[00:16:51 - 00:17:01]	 These are the things they said were impossible. The things they promised assured were impossible are possible.
[00:17:01 - 00:17:16]	 The greatest secret that has been kept from us is that the world is a thousand times, a million times stranger than your wildest supposition and how they keep the lid on this stuff.
[00:17:16 - 00:17:29]	 I do not understand. I mean, I don't understand why I'm the only person saying this, because I'm completely convinced of my own ordinariness.
[00:17:29 - 00:17:37]	 I am I am only a human being. I represent all of you. What happens to me would happen to you.
[00:17:37 - 00:17:45]	 It isn't there's nothing special about me. Well, then, my God, how do they keep the lid on this stuff?
[00:17:45 - 00:17:55]	 It's weird. It's more if if if a fleet of flying saucers were to land on the South Lawn of the White House tomorrow, it would not.
[00:17:55 - 00:18:11]	 It would not change the fact that the weirdest thing in the universe is the DMT flash flying saucers landing on the South Lawn of the White House is a positively mundane possibility compared to this thing, which is real.
[00:18:11 - 00:18:18]	 It's here. It's now. You don't have to go to Babaji. You don't have to go to the Himalayas.
[00:18:18 - 00:18:27]	 All it's it's it's three tokes away. And and yet, you know, we argue, is it possible? What does it mean? Is it this? Is it that?
[00:18:27 - 00:18:39]	 It's amazing to me. I mean, it is the new world. The Europeans eventually discovered the new world, but they had to sail galleons three months through hell to get there.
[00:18:39 - 00:18:50]	 This is three tokes and 30 seconds away. And it is the absolute confounding exhibit of the whole structure of Western civilization.
[00:18:50 - 00:19:05]	 How can they keep the lid on it? I don't get it. This person is individual spiritual development fit in without use of hallucinogens in your world or in your scheme of thinking.
[00:19:05 - 00:19:12]	 And two last night you talked about the business of being. Should be the cultivation of love of love.
[00:19:12 - 00:19:25]	 And I would like to hear more about that an hour later. And in theory, I'd like to know what do you think you would be doing today in life if you had never used any psychedelics?
[00:19:25 - 00:19:42]	 Well, first to the spiritual question, which is an interesting question to me, everyone casts the psychedelic experience in terms of being a subcategory of the spiritual quest.
[00:19:42 - 00:19:58]	 I'm not exactly sure about that. I've taken lots of psychedelics over nearly 30 years now. And, you know, I have a marriage dissolving.
[00:19:58 - 00:20:12]	 I have people who will tell you I'm a terrible person to negotiate a contract with. I feel myself to be a moral paragon of nothing.
[00:20:12 - 00:20:26]	 And I'm not sure it has anything to do with the spiritual quest. It seems to me true spirituality is a very here and now matter.
[00:20:26 - 00:20:38]	 One should visit the sick and imprisoned, clothe the naked, bury the dead, care for orphans, feed the hungry.
[00:20:38 - 00:20:45]	 That's what the spiritual life is about. It's very down to earth, straightforward.
[00:20:45 - 00:21:04]	 I'm very puzzled and I put more than psychedelics in this category. What, like mantras, yantras, practices, do these things really ameliorate the suffering of the human condition?
[00:21:04 - 00:21:20]	 They may be good for something. The question is what? Perhaps indirectly the psychedelic synergize the spiritual life because they just show you that life is to be taken seriously.
[00:21:20 - 00:21:36]	 And there is a great deal of it to be assimilated. But in terms of suggesting that you are a more spiritually advanced person, if you take psychedelics, I don't really see any evidence for that.
[00:21:36 - 00:21:52]	 I do think that you cannot take psychedelics without losing a portion of your ego because it will, it's too hard for the egomaniac to take psychedelics.
[00:21:52 - 00:22:04]	 The egoist will turn away from it, will have such bad trips that they will put it down, I think.
[00:22:04 - 00:22:16]	 This is an interesting question. This question of, you know, like the question I ask myself, here we are, we are psychedelic people, presumably by some high percentage.
[00:22:16 - 00:22:23]	 Are we in any way morally superior to people who don't take psychedelics?
[00:22:23 - 00:22:38]	 Maybe we're a little bit gentler and more open minded, but probably in any mud wrestling situation, we can be just as down and dirty as the next person to some degree.
[00:22:38 - 00:22:53]	 So I see it more as, that's why I don't think of myself as a guru. I think of myself as an explorer of a geography, the purposes of which are probably multiple.
[00:22:53 - 00:23:12]	 In other words, I suppose we can use psychedelics to shape personalities and brainwash people and control them. And I suppose we can use it to lead people to make peace with death, mortality, their own limitations.
[00:23:12 - 00:23:28]	 It seems to me it's a morally neutral dimension and it can be used for good or ill and maybe slightly edging toward the good because it's very hard for egomaniacs to do anything with this stuff.
[00:23:28 - 00:23:35]	 The CIA's involvement with LSD is an instructive situation.
[00:23:35 - 00:23:55]	 The CIA got onto LSD well ahead of everybody else and the first notion was, and if you're interested in this, you can read J. Steven, or not, no, the other one, Acid Dreams, Martin Lee's book and Schlein was the co-author.
[00:23:55 - 00:24:11]	 The CIA's first assumption about LSD was that it was a kind of super truth serum and that they could kidnap KGB agents and give them LSD and they would spew out all their contacts and so forth and so on.
[00:24:11 - 00:24:25]	 So a year of researching that possibility convinced them they were on the wrong track and so then they decided it isn't a truth serum, it's an anti-truth serum.
[00:24:25 - 00:24:41]	 We will give our agents this drug and if they ever fall into enemy hands they will take it and then it will be impossible for the enemy to get any coherent account out of them of what is going on.
[00:24:41 - 00:24:56]	 Within a few months of that and they discovered no, under some circumstances our people just tell all under LSD so then they decided that they could program a Manchurian candidate type situation with it.
[00:24:56 - 00:25:12]	 And that was abandoned and I think largely they have lost interest in this stuff. I asked in the Amazon, I asked the mushroom at one point because I could see that we were going to carry it back to the world in some form.
[00:25:12 - 00:25:26]	 I said can't this be perverted, can't it be misused and it said only the good can come near this.
[00:25:26 - 00:25:46]	 Well maybe good doesn't mean exactly what we think it means, you know it isn't a kind of piety worn on your cuff, it's something else, it's a sincere wish to understand, that's the motivation that the psychedelics will turbo charge.
[00:25:46 - 00:26:06]	 As to your question about what would I be doing if I hadn't taken psychedelics, well I don't know. What I was doing, what I assumed I would end up doing before I took psychedelics was hopefully end up teaching art history in a very exclusive eastern girls school somewhere for a long long time.
[00:26:06 - 00:26:18]	 It was a kind of Nabokovian lecture, it was my life's plan. And what was your, oh and love, love.
[00:26:18 - 00:26:44]	 Well my analysis of what psychedelics do if you think not about my trip or your trip but thousands, tens of thousands of these experiences, what can we say that would be true of every psychedelic experience, every high dose psychedelic experience, what can we say that would be a general truism.
[00:26:44 - 00:27:01]	 What you could say is that psychedelics dissolve boundaries, that's what they do. The boundary between nature and society, between mind and body, between self and other, they dissolve boundaries.
[00:27:01 - 00:27:22]	 And this is what love does when it is working right. I mean you are able to place yourself in the second position for a child, for a lover, for a cause, for whatever it is, you know you take second position.
[00:27:22 - 00:27:46]	 And so I see them essentially as aphrodisiacs of a strange sort. They empower not genital prowess but real caring by showing that all differences are illusions.
[00:27:46 - 00:28:06]	 That what is real is the unbroken seamless plenum of being. And this is what we need to learn because our whole social construct has been based on the establishment and maintenance of boundaries.
[00:28:06 - 00:28:25]	 I mean we are the most boundary obsessed human society that has ever existed. You know when I go to the Amazon and spend time with the up river people, the hardest thing for me to get used to is that I never have any privacy, ever.
[00:28:25 - 00:28:42]	 You know I hang my hammock in the long house and you know people are fighting and giving birth and having sex and arguing and doing all these things. Even the act of defecation is not necessarily private.
[00:28:42 - 00:29:09]	 So boundary dissolution and boundary maintenance is what really, anxiety about these things is what characterizes our society. I think and I will mention it briefly here before the break that some of you may have somehow escaped being exposed to my theory of human evolution which is contained in "Food of the Gods".
[00:29:09 - 00:29:34]	 I think that we achieved a kind of perfection in human relations and in the relationship between human beings and nature sometime in the last million years and that we maintained that relationship till as recently as 15,000 years ago.
[00:29:34 - 00:29:47]	 And we achieved this through a quasi symbiotic or let's put it this way, an incipiently symbiotic relationship to psilocybin.
[00:29:47 - 00:30:16]	 You see, I'll give this to you in the short form because probably most of you have heard it, all primates organize themselves using male dominance hierarchies. You go clear back into lemurs and squirrel monkeys and it's the hard-muscled, sharp-fanged young males who set the agenda and everybody else, women, children, week older males,
[00:30:16 - 00:30:39]	 have to dance to that tune. This is a characteristic of primate organization. It is also a characteristic of our society today as we sit here and we know that the suppression not only of women as individuals but of the feminine itself as an idea has made us tremendously,
[00:30:39 - 00:30:58]	 has blocked our potential and made us tremendously neurotic. Well, I think that when we came down out of the trees, we were male dominators, hierarchically organized creatures and then we encountered psilocybin as an item within our diet.
[00:30:58 - 00:31:16]	 And without anybody realizing what was happening, it constituted a chemical intervention against hierarchical organization. And an orgiastic means sharing of sexual partners.
[00:31:16 - 00:31:38]	 Style arose in the wake of accepting psilocybin into the diet. Psilocybin promoted in low doses increased visual acuity. This is an established fact. And that allowed the psilocybin using members of the species to outbreed the non-psilocybin using members.
[00:31:38 - 00:32:00]	 And human consciousness evolving, had been evolving, continued to evolve and through the augmentation of psilocybin fell into a relationship of direct experience with this goddess-like, Gaian totality, the mind of the earth.
[00:32:00 - 00:32:22]	 And then there was a dynamic, satisfying balance between the expression of human advanced cognitive faculties and a human sense of our place in nature and our roles vis-a-vis each other and so forth and so on.
[00:32:22 - 00:32:39]	 In short, paradise. And it persisted for, who knows, let's say a million years. And it only faded when the mushrooms became, through climatological change and migration, unavailable.
[00:32:39 - 00:33:05]	 And when the mushroom became scarce and scarcer and unavailable, after a million years of chemical suppression of the primate tendency to form dominance hierarchies, the old behavior, which had never been genetically removed from the picture, reemerged 12,000 years ago, no more.
[00:33:05 - 00:33:23]	 And it must have been like hell itself. People suddenly no longer were caring for each other. Suddenly men wanted to control the sexual and reproductive activities of women.
[00:33:23 - 00:33:39]	 The concept of territory emerged. This is at the precise moment in time when agriculture was invented. Agriculture put an end to the nomadic yearly wanderings of the human family.
[00:33:39 - 00:33:58]	 It put an emphasis on sedentary lifestyles. The problem with agriculture, especially in the early phase, was that it was so phenomenally successful, you can imagine farming the alluvial detritus of these river valleys that had never been touched.
[00:33:58 - 00:34:13]	 Surpluses were created. Surplus, in the presence of a dominator or hierarchical attitude, must be defended. And so suddenly you have haves and have nots, us and them.
[00:34:13 - 00:34:34]	 The most advanced structure on this planet 11,000 years ago was the grain tower at Jericho. It was a storage area for grain and it was a tower so that you could beat back attacks by hungry neighbors that you no longer identified with sufficiently to share your food.
[00:34:34 - 00:34:45]	 And in the absence of psilocybin, this structure emerged in the psyche, which we call ego.
[00:34:45 - 00:35:11]	 If you have psilocybin in your diet, the ego, it's like taking chemotherapy or something. The calcareous tumor of ego is never able to form in a situation where psilocybin is being taken, group sexual experiences in a religious context are being orchestrated at the new and full moon.
[00:35:11 - 00:35:33]	 Sharing of food, sharing of childcare, sharing of sexual partners, all that is ended when the ego is born and the ego is the boundary establisher par excellence because it establishes me and mine as opposed to you and yours.
[00:35:33 - 00:35:53]	 And with the invention of agriculture, the establishment of large sedentary populations, that means cities, the establishment of specialized roles, that means kingship, the emergence of male dominance, the emergence of warfare.
[00:35:53 - 00:36:07]	 These are the institutions that are fatal to our higher aspirations, to our hopes, even at this moment as they were 10 to 15,000 years ago.
[00:36:07 - 00:36:23]	 That's why I think we have to chemically intervene because we have fallen into a dysfunctional relationship toward the components of our own psyche. And it's fine if monkeys want to dominate each other.
[00:36:23 - 00:36:41]	 But when you have in the space in which we existed in the psilocybin maintained partnership mode, we developed language, symbolic representation, dance, theater, so forth and so on.
[00:36:41 - 00:37:01]	 And we acquired and empowered the tremendous imagination that has allowed us to build the cultures that we see around us. That kind of power is only safe in the hands of collective community minded creatures.
[00:37:01 - 00:37:10]	 And in the hands of ego driven creatures, it leads straight to Auschwitz and the hydrogen bomb, as it did.
[00:37:10 - 00:37:29]	 So I think, you know, history is a state of chemical deprivation that allows animal, ancient animal patterns of behavior that degrade and confuse us to reemerge and stabilize themselves.
[00:37:29 - 00:37:44]	 What would the response be to that? You mean in the present situation?
[00:37:44 - 00:38:03]	 Well, what it invokes is ever greater distance between those at the top and those at the bottom of the social pyramid and an ever fiercer and more and an emergence of ever more brutal behavior patterns, which is what we see happening.
[00:38:03 - 00:38:18]	 I mean, our world is getting uglier and meaner and more mean spirited by the moment because those who have are so anxious about the fact that they might be asked to share it.
[00:38:18 - 00:38:41]	 I mean, what we've gone through in the last 12 years in this country is a tremendous transfer of wealth to the upper two percent of society and concomitantly a tremendous spread of anxiety, alienation and dehumanizing of the entire social enterprise.
[00:38:41 - 00:38:49]	 I mean, if we don't get hold of ourselves, the next century, most of the world is going to be a toxic desert.
[00:38:49 - 00:39:16]	 And then here and there, there will be very well defended pleasure don'ts in which a very small number of incredibly wealthy people will live out lives of utterly self indulgent, hedonistic fantasy in denial of the moral catastrophe that they participated in in order to achieve that hedonic state of isolation.
[00:39:16 - 00:39:18]	 I mean, that's clearly happening.
[00:39:18 - 00:39:21]	 Metaphorically, that's what we have already.
[00:39:21 - 00:39:25]	 I mean, not to freak you out, but that's where we're sitting right now.
[00:39:25 - 00:39:30]	 You know, I mean, compared to Bosnia and Haiti and Somalia.
[00:39:30 - 00:39:38]	 Create defensiveness and create defensiveness, then what is the alternative?
[00:39:38 - 00:39:46]	 Well, it neither create defensiveness except in the presence of the ego.
[00:39:46 - 00:40:00]	 In other words, what we have to do is teach people to care for each other as a primary value, not something you do after, you know, you pay for your Mercedes and all that.
[00:40:00 - 00:40:04]	 But as the primary value, we have to have community.
[00:40:04 - 00:40:05]	 It's very simple.
[00:40:05 - 00:40:06]	 We don't have community.
[00:40:06 - 00:40:22]	 We have a free for all where the devil takes the hindmost, the most brutal and ruthless among us rise to the top and everybody else has a foot on their neck.
[00:40:22 - 00:40:31]	 We we are now in a hell of a fix because we've waited so long to address these problems.
[00:40:31 - 00:40:46]	 There is not now enough gold, aluminum, iron, so forth in the planet to raise everyone to a middle class standard as it's enjoyed in Southern California.
[00:40:46 - 00:40:59]	 And yet we have unleashed these expectations in everyone by flagellating people with images of material wealth and comfort.
[00:40:59 - 00:41:08]	 The whole we must re-empower the individual and the quality of individual experience.
[00:41:08 - 00:41:24]	 In other words, you have to convince somebody that you are a richer person on five grams of psilocybin than you are if you live in a five million dollar house and are spending fifty thousand dollars a year on psychotherapy because you're miserable.
[00:41:24 - 00:41:37]	 You see, we have allowed ourselves to be tremendously disempowered by allowing our values to shift toward the material domain.
[00:41:37 - 00:41:40]	 You can't take it with you, folks.
[00:41:40 - 00:41:51]	 But the soul is the vehicle that you do take with you into whatever dimensions of continuity exist beyond this mortal coil.
[00:41:51 - 00:42:04]	 So instead of balancing and replacing the tires on your Porsche, you should be balancing and replacing the tires on your after death vehicle.
[00:42:04 - 00:42:12]	 After all, that's the one that's going to have to serve you well in the clinches, you see.
[00:42:12 - 00:42:23]	 How have you worked with the terror in dissolving, you know, on your journey, how have you worked with the terror in dissolving the ego boundaries?
[00:42:23 - 00:42:29]	 Well, you're right. There is a component of terror in this kind of work.
[00:42:29 - 00:42:38]	 You know, the Rolling Stones song, You Don't Get What You Want, You Get What You Need is never more true than with psychedelics.
[00:42:38 - 00:42:46]	 But in terms of practical suggestions, fear is has many aspects.
[00:42:46 - 00:42:54]	 But one aspect of it is it has a chemistry and the chemistry of fear is fairly short term.
[00:42:54 - 00:43:01]	 You've probably all experienced driving on the freeway and somebody cuts right in front of you.
[00:43:01 - 00:43:09]	 And there is a it feels like your body temperature must rise about five degrees in about a third of a second.
[00:43:09 - 00:43:13]	 It's an incredibly fast chemistry that goes on there.
[00:43:13 - 00:43:20]	 And then in about five seconds, you fall back down to within normal parameters.
[00:43:20 - 00:43:25]	 The one way to deal with fear is sit still and wait.
[00:43:25 - 00:43:29]	 In other words, the psychedelic terror is usually fairly unfocused.
[00:43:29 - 00:43:38]	 It is simply raw terror. Well, just sit still and shut up and watch the chemicals in your mind.
[00:43:38 - 00:43:47]	 Tear those molecules apart. And rarely can the fear sustain itself more than five or 10 minutes because it has to.
[00:43:47 - 00:43:57]	 It has the force of a blow. But then you can you can sustain the blow and chemical equilibrium returns.
[00:43:57 - 00:44:02]	 The other thing and this is great, very good advice. Don't forget it.
[00:44:02 - 00:44:09]	 It's hard for Western people to keep it on their plate. Sing, sing.
[00:44:09 - 00:44:21]	 The way we relate to terror is we crunch, clench, withdraw and hunch over in some kind of fetal position like you're being beat on.
[00:44:21 - 00:44:32]	 What you want to do is is sit up straight, straighten your spinal column, open your air passages and begin to cycle oxygen through.
[00:44:32 - 00:44:43]	 And if you sing in a very few minutes, the chemical foundations of the fear will be will be washed away.
[00:44:43 - 00:44:48]	 So that's very practical. So the mantra. It doesn't matter.
[00:44:48 - 00:44:54]	 Mantra, yantra, you know, everything becomes profound on psychedelics.
[00:44:54 - 00:45:00]	 I mean, I tend toward row, row, row your boat gently down the stream.
[00:45:00 - 00:45:07]	 Merrily, merrily, merrily. Life is but a dream. Well, I see it's lunchtime.
[00:45:07 - 00:45:12]	 Why don't we break? Keep your keep your questions.
[00:45:12 - 00:45:20]	 We'll come back at about a quarter of two and then we'll push on to the summit.
[00:45:20 - 00:45:32]	 Hopefully. Thanks very much.
[00:45:32 - 00:45:38]	 Oh, thank you.
[00:45:38 - 00:45:56]	 You asked for it. OK, so we're in.
[00:45:56 - 00:45:59]	 Oh, yes. What a heart sinking assumption.
[00:45:59 - 00:46:18]	 My assumption was that we could skate by on questions alone. But what is your question?
[00:46:18 - 00:46:30]	 There were no questions. OK, so an oblique request to override questions.
[00:46:30 - 00:46:34]	 Basically, what happens is I end up saying what I want to say anyhow,
[00:46:34 - 00:46:41]	 because you may have noticed a certain logical gap between some of the questions and some of the answers.
[00:46:41 - 00:46:51]	 That's not a failure of your own understanding. That's what's going on, as a matter of fact, you know.
[00:46:51 - 00:46:58]	 But you had a question. I just wanted to kind of introduce a new idea here.
[00:46:58 - 00:47:02]	 I mean, it's probably an old idea, but also a new idea.
[00:47:02 - 00:47:06]	 I this was years ago that I played the Ouija board a lot.
[00:47:06 - 00:47:14]	 And one strange evening I was playing and I asked the question, who are we talking to when we speak to the Ouija board?
[00:47:14 - 00:47:21]	 And the reply was in your future, man will be able to speak with his ancestors,
[00:47:21 - 00:47:27]	 contrary to popular belief that you were speaking to your ancestors, which meant basically that in our future,
[00:47:27 - 00:47:32]	 we're going to discover ways to talk to the past and deliver messages through the past.
[00:47:32 - 00:47:47]	 And in connection with the UFO experience, I was wondering if quite possibly that that the extraterrestrial was actually us in the future coming back.
[00:47:47 - 00:47:52]	 You know, discover the technology of traveling through time.
[00:47:52 - 00:47:57]	 You know, and I was just wondering if you had anything to say about that.
[00:47:57 - 00:48:07]	 Now, watch how this question is perverted into a episode of speechifying on my part.
[00:48:07 - 00:48:13]	 I'm glad you asked that question.
[00:48:13 - 00:48:18]	 Well, I mean, I thought a lot about this.
[00:48:18 - 00:48:43]	 We I suppose in order to get into it, what I should do is just take a moment or two to actually describe for you my idea or my account of what it is that lies at the very center or at least as far into the center as I've been able to push of these experiences.
[00:48:43 - 00:48:52]	 To my mind, I mean, I mentioned here this morning that DMT seems to me the most powerful of these things.
[00:48:52 - 00:49:06]	 What powerful means in that context is that more of the motifs are present at greater energy than they are in some of these other compounds.
[00:49:06 - 00:49:26]	 And, you know, at the risk of repeating myself, what happens to most people, I think if they are able to remember it, what an actual DMT flash is like is, you know, you get this stuff.
[00:49:26 - 00:49:29]	 It's vaporized in a glass pipe. It's smoked.
[00:49:29 - 00:49:43]	 It comes on in about half a minute or less and is immensely stronger than any amount of psilocybin or LSD could conceivably be, I think.
[00:49:43 - 00:50:00]	 And what happens is and I'll speak in the first person just to make it manageable. What happens is I break into a space.
[00:50:00 - 00:50:03]	 First of all, I am fully myself.
[00:50:03 - 00:50:07]	 In other words, I am exactly who I was before.
[00:50:07 - 00:50:11]	 That's why on one level I say DMT doesn't affect your mind.
[00:50:11 - 00:50:16]	 You are not euphoric, ecstatic.
[00:50:16 - 00:50:19]	 You are exactly who you were before.
[00:50:19 - 00:50:23]	 But there is a sense of pushing through a membrane of some sort.
[00:50:23 - 00:50:29]	 There's actually a sound as though someone had wadded up a cellophane bread wrapper.
[00:50:29 - 00:50:41]	 That crackling sound, which some people assumed erroneously were brain cells frying in your cerebellum.
[00:50:41 - 00:50:49]	 A friend of mine said it's your soul as radio intellect leaving your body through the top of your head.
[00:50:49 - 00:50:59]	 Well, whatever it is, you burst into a space. I burst into a space that is inhabited.
[00:50:59 - 00:51:09]	 That's the first shocker is there is no ambiguity about it because there's an ear splitting cheer as you break into this space.
[00:51:09 - 00:51:12]	 It's an elf nest of some sort.
[00:51:12 - 00:51:22]	 There are hundreds of these self-dribbling jeweled basketballs, sort of.
[00:51:22 - 00:51:27]	 That's a heavy download into English of what they are.
[00:51:27 - 00:51:37]	 They are autonomous, separate from the background, and they bound forward screaming hello, basically.
[00:51:37 - 00:51:53]	 For someone who expected insight into their relationship or their financial circumstances, this is a fairly astonishing and rapid turn of development.
[00:51:53 - 00:52:01]	 They are intently focused upon you.
[00:52:01 - 00:52:11]	 When it happens to me, they yell hooray, and then they are like long-lost acquaintances.
[00:52:11 - 00:52:15]	 They literally pour over you. They crawl over you.
[00:52:15 - 00:52:20]	 You're being hugged by a troop of hyperspatial machine elves.
[00:52:20 - 00:52:28]	 They say, "You stay away so long. You send so many, but you come so rarely.
[00:52:28 - 00:52:31]	 We're so happy to see you."
[00:52:31 - 00:52:41]	 There is a sense of being somehow, without being able to cognize the logic of it, you're underground.
[00:52:41 - 00:52:44]	 You can tell that you're far underground.
[00:52:44 - 00:52:53]	 The main thing going on in this place is that these things are creatures of language.
[00:52:53 - 00:52:57]	 They are elves of syntactical intent.
[00:52:57 - 00:53:02]	 They appear to be made of language, not matter.
[00:53:02 - 00:53:08]	 They are in a process of continuous semantic transformation.
[00:53:08 - 00:53:15]	 Meaning is crawling across their surfaces in a state of continual metamorphosis.
[00:53:15 - 00:53:31]	 They are emitting sounds roughly analogous to some kind of music or language, except that this is like no music or language you've ever heard.
[00:53:31 - 00:53:38]	 Because what it is, is it is something capable of being visibly apprehended.
[00:53:38 - 00:53:47]	 It's sound which you can see. It's linguistic structure whose syntax is visible in three-dimensional space.
[00:53:47 - 00:54:00]	 They use their voices to make objects which are, in some sense, the central focus of the experience.
[00:54:00 - 00:54:15]	 Because out of the air, out of their bodies, out of your body, they condense, create, and pluck these objects which they offer for your inspection.
[00:54:15 - 00:54:26]	 As you lean forward to look at one of these things, midst this clamor of elf hysteria, you, as I said, are fully yourself.
[00:54:26 - 00:54:36]	 Your judgment is not impaired. In fact, they are saying to you, "Fight excitement. Do not abandon yourself to amazement."
[00:54:36 - 00:54:46]	 In other words, they're telling you, "Stay down. Don't just go off on some arm-waving rave about how this is impossible and outlandish and outrageous.
[00:54:46 - 00:54:57]	 Try to stay focused on what we're doing." What they show you are objects that are intrinsically and inherently impossible.
[00:54:57 - 00:55:10]	 These things made of tools, gold, ivory, cut stone, flesh, music, hope, odor, it's hard to talk about.
[00:55:10 - 00:55:20]	 But when you direct your attention towards these things, you can tell by looking at it that if you could get it into three-dimensional space,
[00:55:20 - 00:55:31]	 if I could suddenly whip one out of my briefcase and display it to you, our world, our intellectual constructs would collapse upon themselves.
[00:55:31 - 00:55:42]	 Because this is impossible, impossibly beautiful, impossibly constructed, defying of the laws of physics and chemistry.
[00:55:42 - 00:55:51]	 So is there a multi-dimensional life force that is the same through the entire dimension?
[00:55:51 - 00:55:59]	 That's a higher dimension. Actually, maybe from the future. Maybe. I mean, as far as three-dimensional time is concerned, there is no such thing.
[00:55:59 - 00:56:08]	 Well, that's what we've created. So are they actually trying to tell you that, okay, everything you see is impossible is not really impossible?
[00:56:08 - 00:56:16]	 Introducing to you that nothing is impossible and that that is our future way of thinking, is that nothing is impossible and otherwise we're doomed.
[00:56:16 - 00:56:22]	 Well, I have a sort of an, I almost said rational, but let's say at least orderly kind of mind.
[00:56:22 - 00:56:33]	 So I tried to understand, you know, what could this be? So you make a list of hypotheses and then think about each hypothesis and test it against the evidence.
[00:56:33 - 00:56:42]	 Okay, hypothesis one, DMT is not a drug. It is an extraterrestrial communication device.
[00:56:42 - 00:56:59]	 These are creatures somewhere in the universe who are so different from us that they come to us not in starships the size of Manhattan, but in drug molecules that are dinky.
[00:56:59 - 00:57:07]	 So we are in contact here with some kind of extraterrestrial technology.
[00:57:07 - 00:57:16]	 And these are true aliens of some sort. And God knows the weirdness of the situation supports the hypothesis.
[00:57:16 - 00:57:26]	 Okay, second hypothesis. There is a parallel universe unsuspected by most human beings.
[00:57:26 - 00:57:35]	 It's right here all the time. It's inhabited. These things have their own hopes, fears, problems, so forth.
[00:57:35 - 00:57:44]	 And somehow this drug just erases this boundary. And then you're you find yourself in the elf nest.
[00:57:44 - 00:58:01]	 Okay, next hypothesis. These things, because they have great affection for me, because they seem intent on the task of communicating.
[00:58:01 - 00:58:11]	 Perhaps they are human beings from the distant future. Perhaps this is what we are fated to become.
[00:58:11 - 00:58:17]	 You know, there's always since we were kids, the cliche beings of pure energy.
[00:58:17 - 00:58:21]	 Well, it's always been a little hard to wrap your mind around what that would look like.
[00:58:21 - 00:58:34]	 But lo and behold, here appear to be creatures of pure energy. But there are a lot of problems with hypothesizing a future human technological breakthrough,
[00:58:34 - 00:58:42]	 which would allow them to actually manipulate the past logical paradoxes and that sort of thing.
[00:58:42 - 00:58:53]	 Well, so then here's another possibility. They are human beings, but they are not in the future in the ordinary sense or in the past.
[00:58:53 - 00:59:09]	 They are in the prenatal and post life phase. In other words, these are either the the unborn waiting in some limbo like dimension to descend into matter.
[00:59:09 - 00:59:20]	 Or they are, in fact, people who have had a sojourn in the domain of organic existence and now have moved on.
[00:59:20 - 00:59:24]	 Let me not kid you, we're talking about dead people here in that case.
[00:59:24 - 00:59:37]	 Well, if you go to the if you go to the shamans who who access these places through ayahuasca or the Verola snuffs or something like that, they will say,
[00:59:37 - 00:59:48]	 well, these are ancestors. Didn't you read Marsiliad? Don't you know that shamanism works through ancestor magic?
[00:59:48 - 00:59:55]	 Well, ancestor is a tremendously sanitized term for dead people.
[00:59:55 - 01:00:11]	 And if what is actually happening here is that the much argued about soul is actually made visible by this pharmacological strategy, I mean, God knows why.
[01:00:11 - 01:00:21]	 But God knows why anything else is the way it is. Then this is truly big news. This is the confounding of rationalism.
[01:00:21 - 01:00:35]	 If what is happening is that by pushing the frontiers of pharmacology, we discover a way to even momentarily and temporarily erase the boundary between the living and the dead.
[01:00:35 - 01:00:46]	 Then this is a hundred and eighty degree turn on the evolution of culture that not even the most technically infatuated among us are prepared to assimilate.
[01:00:46 - 01:00:58]	 I mean, it's no it's no challenge on that scale of things to expect visitors from Zanebo, the new beers, Zeta, particularly, or some other distant piece of real estate.
[01:00:58 - 01:01:06]	 But to expect visitors from, you know, beyond the grave, that's a little confounding.
[01:01:06 - 01:01:35]	 And over time, I've sort of come to incline to the idea that this is what is in fact going on. And the reason it's so hard to bring anything out of the DMT flash is because at the center of the flash, you find out something so unexpected, so appalling and so existentially convincing in the moment of confronting it that you simply immediately block it out.
[01:01:35 - 01:01:44]	 And obliterated. And then and these things are very focused on getting you to do what they're doing.
[01:01:44 - 01:01:51]	 I mean, they say you can do what we are doing. Do it. Do it.
[01:01:51 - 01:02:13]	 And what they want you to do is use your voice to make objects appear in visual space as though language admittedly the phenomenon with which we are involved in a way that no other animal species on this planet is.
[01:02:13 - 01:02:32]	 But that language, as practiced by human beings, is an incomplete enchantment. And that pushed to its limits, language becomes not something heard with the ears, but something seen with the eyes.
[01:02:32 - 01:02:49]	 On the brink, potentially through pharmacological reengineering of ourselves and and through studying of these shamanic states of mind about to move into a domain where we see each other's thoughts.
[01:02:49 - 01:02:58]	 Now, normally when we conceive of telepathy, we think of it as you hear what I think.
[01:02:58 - 01:03:09]	 Telepathy is you see what I mean. You see telepathy as a function which goes on in the domain of seeing, not of hearing.
[01:03:09 - 01:03:24]	 And why this is important rather than just some weird psychic ability is because our boundaries are based on our relationship to our language.
[01:03:24 - 01:03:36]	 If you could see what I mean in a fairly profound sense, you would be me in a much more profound sense than when you hear what I say.
[01:03:36 - 01:03:43]	 Because think about it for a minute. Analyze what normal, ordinary communication is.
[01:03:43 - 01:03:46]	 I want to communicate with you.
[01:03:46 - 01:03:58]	 I consult my internal dictionary and I carefully choose words out of my dictionary and I string them together according to the rules of English syntax.
[01:03:58 - 01:04:06]	 I then activate if I've done things in the right order, I then activate my vocal apparatus.
[01:04:06 - 01:04:14]	 I impart a vibration, an acoustical wave onto the surrounding medium, which is air.
[01:04:14 - 01:04:24]	 This vibration moves across space. It enters through the holes on both sides of your head as a pressure wave.
[01:04:24 - 01:04:40]	 You then, analyzing this incoming waveform, rush to your dictionary and you break up this incoming wave signature and attempt to map it to words in your dictionary.
[01:04:40 - 01:04:54]	 Now, if your dictionary and my dictionary are the same, then you will, lo and behold, reconstruct my thought in the confines of your brain-mind system.
[01:04:54 - 01:05:03]	 But notice the caveat that was slipped in there. If your dictionary and my dictionary are the same.
[01:05:03 - 01:05:05]	 But they never are.
[01:05:05 - 01:05:11]	 I mean, maybe they are if you ask, can you tell me what time it is or would you please turn down the stereo?
[01:05:11 - 01:05:28]	 But if you're talking about anything of interest, depth, ambiguity or complexity, then chances are your dictionary and my dictionary only generally assimilate to congruency with each other.
[01:05:28 - 01:05:33]	 So then, ambiguity creeps in.
[01:05:33 - 01:05:38]	 You think you understand. I think you understand.
[01:05:38 - 01:05:51]	 And on that shaky foundation, we begin to build further semi understandings and then we drift off in the general direction of misapprehension eventually.
[01:05:51 - 01:06:15]	 Well, if you could see what I mean, there would be no ambiguity in our communication because we would, the intention of language would be established in visual space with an existential modality about it similar to sculpture.
[01:06:15 - 01:06:28]	 I would make it, but having made it, you and I would both examine it, walk around it and have the faith that we were looking at the same thing.
[01:06:28 - 01:06:31]	 And this would tend to erase our boundaries.
[01:06:31 - 01:06:49]	 So it's very clear that communication of the ordinary sort, small mouth noises transduced across acoustical space and symbolic notations thereof have created the global civilization that we're living inside of.
[01:06:49 - 01:06:59]	 But how much more collectivist, how much more community we would have if we could see what each other mean.
[01:06:59 - 01:07:13]	 And so I am beginning to assume that the proper way to think about these hallucinogens is as catalysts for language formation, as catalysts for the project of communication.
[01:07:13 - 01:07:23]	 And that the end result of the project of communication is that we become what we behold.
[01:07:23 - 01:07:28]	 In other words, there is not the sense of the observed and the observer.
[01:07:28 - 01:07:36]	 These two polarities of an experience are merged in the act of pure perception.
[01:07:36 - 01:07:43]	 And this is something emerging out of our biological organization.
[01:07:43 - 01:07:51]	 It's not a cultural development the way a new invention or a new mathematical algorithm or something like that would be.
[01:07:51 - 01:07:59]	 It's an evolution of our neural capacity.
[01:07:59 - 01:08:03]	 And then let me just say one more thing about it and then we can talk about it.
[01:08:03 - 01:08:12]	 There is a model for this in nature that makes clear, I think, what I'm driving at.
[01:08:12 - 01:08:16]	 As many of you know, octopi change colors.
[01:08:16 - 01:08:27]	 We learn this from wonderful television programs about nature that keep us from being in nature, but nevertheless inform us of the details of nature.
[01:08:27 - 01:08:29]	 Octopi change color.
[01:08:29 - 01:08:38]	 They have a very large repertoire of dots, blushes, spottings, ripples and so forth.
[01:08:38 - 01:08:42]	 It was for a long time thought that this was camouflage.
[01:08:42 - 01:08:49]	 Now it's been understood by people who study animal communication that this is not camouflage.
[01:08:49 - 01:08:51]	 This is language.
[01:08:51 - 01:09:07]	 The octopus does not make small mouth noises that move through space because in the aqueous medium, there are certain physical problems that make that an improbable way to do business.
[01:09:07 - 01:09:13]	 What the octopus does is it is its own syntax.
[01:09:13 - 01:09:16]	 It doesn't generate syntax.
[01:09:16 - 01:09:19]	 It becomes syntax.
[01:09:19 - 01:09:24]	 So the mind of the octopus is worn on its surface.
[01:09:24 - 01:09:31]	 Its thoughts ripple across its geometry as color changes.
[01:09:31 - 01:09:39]	 It is in effect operationally a naked mind, not a naked brain, a naked mind.
[01:09:39 - 01:09:59]	 So when one octopus encounters another, by the mere act of looking, it can tell how long it's been since the other one has eaten, how long it's been since it's had sex, what its general attitude toward the world is at that moment, so forth and so on.
[01:09:59 - 01:10:05]	 It is able to visually apprehend the mental universe of the other.
[01:10:05 - 01:10:10]	 This is why octopi extrude ink into the water.
[01:10:10 - 01:10:20]	 It's because it's the only way they can create a private dimension for themselves because for an octopus to be beheld is to be understood.
[01:10:20 - 01:10:28]	 So you can think of octopus ink as correction fluid for misspoken cephalopods, if you like.
[01:10:28 - 01:10:34]	 Well, in a sense, this is what we, I think, are headed for.
[01:10:34 - 01:10:39]	 In a way, we can already do this in a very crude way.
[01:10:39 - 01:10:42]	 We have faces.
[01:10:42 - 01:10:45]	 No other animal has a face.
[01:10:45 - 01:10:50]	 Other animals have fronts to their heads, but we have faces.
[01:10:50 - 01:11:00]	 It's an area where a lot of musculature is under the surface, is under the control of the intent to communicate.
[01:11:00 - 01:11:08]	 So by scowling, squinting, rolling one's eyes, looking away, so forth and so on, we communicate.
[01:11:08 - 01:11:19]	 Imagine if that communicative ability, rather than being confined to a few square inches on the front of the skull, were to spread out over the entire body.
[01:11:19 - 01:11:24]	 And of course, for the octopus in an aqueous medium, it can fold and unfold itself.
[01:11:24 - 01:11:28]	 It can reveal and hide parts of its body very quickly.
[01:11:28 - 01:11:36]	 It can, in fact, communicate faster than we can communicate with small mouth noises.
[01:11:36 - 01:11:49]	 And this ability to communicate is so important to the biological foundations of octopus existence that when the octopi,
[01:11:49 - 01:11:59]	 all of whom, for all of which I'm not sure, evolved in the shallow waters near coastlines.