[00:00:00 - 00:00:11]	 I want to welcome you to the Phoenix Bookstore. I am Jeannie Brittingham-Erstead. I go by the name of She Who Remembers. I do audio tapes for KPFK.
[00:00:11 - 00:00:21]	 And I was thinking how I wanted to introduce Terrence. I took my name She Who Remembers because of my love of history and the ancient.
[00:00:21 - 00:00:26]	 And there was a wonderful book about the ancient Anasazi Indians called She Who Remembers.
[00:00:26 - 00:00:37]	 Well, in Terrence's tribe, he's got to be He Who Remembers. And I told my kids I was going to see a wonderful storyteller tonight.
[00:00:37 - 00:00:42]	 So I'd like you to all help me in welcoming Terrence McKenna.
[00:00:42 - 00:00:50]	 [Applause]
[00:00:50 - 00:00:57]	 There are copies of Archaic Revival here also.
[00:00:57 - 00:00:59]	 Okay.
[00:00:59 - 00:01:01]	 We'll wake up the world.
[00:01:01 - 00:01:08]	 Well, it's a pleasure to be here. This is Friday. This must be Santa Monica.
[00:01:08 - 00:01:12]	 It's sort of been that kind of a week.
[00:01:12 - 00:01:21]	 I'm humbled and amazed to see so many people turned out for this.
[00:01:21 - 00:01:28]	 Basically, I'm here to promote a new book of mine called Food of the Gods from Bantam.
[00:01:28 - 00:01:37]	 And I understand that there are also here tonight copies of the Archaic Revival, which is technically not released yet.
[00:01:37 - 00:01:48]	 So you can be well ahead of the curve if you get a copy of that, because I don't think it will be generally released for about three weeks.
[00:01:48 - 00:01:57]	 So let me just say a little bit about this book that I've been working on for a couple of years.
[00:01:57 - 00:02:07]	 And then we can talk about it for a half hour or so, and then I'll sign copies for the hard core, so to speak.
[00:02:07 - 00:02:11]	 [Laughter]
[00:02:11 - 00:02:25]	 What I wanted to do with this book, The Food of the Gods, was I wanted to set down in as careful and as well-documented a fashion as possible
[00:02:25 - 00:02:35]	 the argument for looking again at the impact of psychedelic plants on human evolution,
[00:02:35 - 00:02:48]	 on the emergence of all of the higher qualities that we associate with our own unique species out of simple animal organization.
[00:02:48 - 00:03:01]	 And I wanted to do this not because I wanted to carry out some kind of academic criticism of the orthodox theory of evolution,
[00:03:01 - 00:03:16]	 although that was part of my intent, but really because I felt that if we could change the way we think about how psychedelics were used in the past,
[00:03:16 - 00:03:23]	 it would change the way we think about these things in our present situation.
[00:03:23 - 00:03:32]	 Many of you probably lived through a portion of the 1960s psychedelic revolution,
[00:03:32 - 00:03:44]	 and there psychedelic plants and experiences and drugs were presented sort of as instantaneous psychotherapy.
[00:03:44 - 00:03:56]	 There was not in the 1960s the awareness that these were not something new, these experiences and compounds,
[00:03:56 - 00:04:08]	 but really what was being discovered was the world's oldest religion, religion as it was practiced during the first million years
[00:04:08 - 00:04:22]	 before it was taken over by BDI little priests with their shopping lists of moral commandments and prescriptions.
[00:04:22 - 00:04:33]	 Basically you see there is a great mystery about human emergence out of animal organization.
[00:04:33 - 00:04:50]	 The orthodox theory of evolution works very well for explaining how higher plants emerged out of simpler plant forms,
[00:04:50 - 00:05:06]	 how higher animals emerged from lower forms, but the great unsolved mystery of evolution generally is located in our own peculiar story
[00:05:06 - 00:05:17]	 because in less than a couple of million years the human brain size doubled during the last three million years.
[00:05:17 - 00:05:28]	 This has been called the most explosive development of the organ of a higher animal in the entire evolutionary record.
[00:05:28 - 00:05:38]	 So then the question becomes what was the cause, what was the detonator, what was the catalyst
[00:05:38 - 00:05:49]	 which literally revealed the presence of the human soul floating on a platform of primate organization.
[00:05:49 - 00:06:02]	 And the case that I have made is I think very simple, very easy to understand and has deep implications for how we live our own lives today
[00:06:02 - 00:06:11]	 and how we organize our societies today. It's a very simple three step process.
[00:06:11 - 00:06:27]	 As the climaxed tropical rainforests of the cradle of humanity began to recede a million or so years ago in Africa
[00:06:27 - 00:06:40]	 which is the cradle of the human race, our remote fruit eating ancestors who were perfectly happy having achieved a kind of evolutionary equilibrium
[00:06:40 - 00:06:55]	 in the canopies of these tropical rainforests were forced down onto the grasslands in a situation of great evolutionary pressure.
[00:06:55 - 00:07:08]	 They were having to learn new forms of locomotion, bipedalism, a new way of coordinating the visual system, binocular vision
[00:07:08 - 00:07:15]	 and most importantly they were coming under dietary pressure.
[00:07:15 - 00:07:29]	 And one of the points that I make in my book very strongly is that orthodox thinking about evolution has never admitted the importance of diet
[00:07:29 - 00:07:43]	 into thinking about evolution. We all know that evolution proceeds through random mutation which then meets a force called natural selection.
[00:07:43 - 00:07:56]	 But usually random mutation is presented as something which is to be traced back to cosmic rays and radiation present in the environment.
[00:07:56 - 00:08:12]	 Certainly this is one of the inputs into the process of mutation. But you see when an animal or a human being suddenly expands their diet
[00:08:12 - 00:08:27]	 suddenly begins to eat foods and experiment with foods that they have never experimented with before, these foods, these plants contain all kinds of exotic chemicals
[00:08:27 - 00:08:46]	 natural insecticides, agents that cause these plants to taste very bitter so that animals will reject them as food and these chemicals are mutagenic agents.
[00:08:46 - 00:08:59]	 So diet, a sudden shift in diet exposes a population to many more mutagenic influences than it was facing previously.
[00:08:59 - 00:09:10]	 This happened to our proto-ancestors and as they began testing new foods in the grassland environment of the African veldt
[00:09:10 - 00:09:27]	 they came upon psilocybin containing mushrooms which were growing in the dung of wild forms of cattle which were also evolving in this new grassland environment.
[00:09:27 - 00:09:49]	 Well now the key or one of the pivotal concepts in my notion is related to the fact that psilocybin actually in very low doses increases visual acuity.
[00:09:49 - 00:09:59]	 Edge detection and a kind of visual clarity is an affect of very low doses of psilocybin.
[00:09:59 - 00:10:08]	 The equivalent in fact of having a plant in the environment which confers chemical binoculars on its user.
[00:10:08 - 00:10:23]	 Well you don't have to be a rocket scientist to see that if there's a plant which gives better vision and there's a hunting and gathering animal in the proximity of that plant
[00:10:23 - 00:10:38]	 that the animals that admit that plant into their diet will be more successful hunters, more successful gatherers, they will obtain an expanded food supply for their offspring
[00:10:38 - 00:10:45]	 and they will tend to outbreed the non psilocybin using members of the population.
[00:10:45 - 00:10:59]	 Now at slightly higher doses psilocybin like all CNS stimulants causes what pharmacologists and medical people call arousal.
[00:10:59 - 00:11:13]	 This simply means a kind of undirected restlessness, a state of high alertness, restlessness, pacing and in a highly sexed species like ourselves
[00:11:13 - 00:11:19]	 it means erection in the male and subsequent sexual activity.
[00:11:19 - 00:11:30]	 This is a second factor then which would promote the outbreeding of the non psilocybin using members of the population you see
[00:11:30 - 00:11:39]	 because the psilocybin using members of the population have an expanded food supply, more sex, more offspring.
[00:11:39 - 00:11:44]	 Naturally they will tend to push out other members of the group.
[00:11:44 - 00:11:59]	 Well then finally at the psychedelic dose level of these mushrooms you get a very important quality, in fact the centrally important quality for my argument
[00:11:59 - 00:12:08]	 which any of you who have ever taken these things have experienced yourselves and that's what I call boundary dissolution.
[00:12:08 - 00:12:14]	 And here's the notion in a nutshell.
[00:12:14 - 00:12:24]	 When you look back through the primate phylogeny, clear back to the primitive primates, the squirrel monkeys and those sorts of animals
[00:12:24 - 00:12:29]	 there are always what are called male dominance hierarchies.
[00:12:29 - 00:12:42]	 There's an alpha male animal who through brute force usually takes the most desirable females under his command
[00:12:42 - 00:12:55]	 and sets his lieutenants over, his male lieutenants over the rest of the females and this is how these monkey societies order themselves.
[00:12:55 - 00:13:11]	 Well because psilocybin is a boundary dissolving hallucinogen and because the essence of ego consciousness which is necessary for these boundary hierarchies
[00:13:11 - 00:13:17]	 and for these dominance hierarchies, the essence of ego is boundary definition.
[00:13:17 - 00:13:33]	 So what I'm actually suggesting in this book is that we self-medicated ourselves into a state of gender equality and partnership
[00:13:33 - 00:13:47]	 consciously or unconsciously by allowing this item in our diet which suppressed ego and hence suppressed male dominance hierarchies.
[00:13:47 - 00:13:58]	 And so the ordinary momentum of primate evolution was interrupted and for a period of about, who knows, pick a number,
[00:13:58 - 00:14:13]	 somewhere between 15 and 50,000 years ending about 10,000 years ago, we actually lived in a kind of paradise
[00:14:13 - 00:14:24]	 where human beings were at equilibrium and in balance with the earth, where men and women were in balance with each other
[00:14:24 - 00:14:37]	 and I should have mentioned this sexual arousal which went along with the mushroom taking promoted a style of orgy
[00:14:37 - 00:14:47]	 probably at festivals which were lunar, at the new and full moon everybody basically just jumped each other's bones in a big heap
[00:14:47 - 00:15:00]	 and the social consequence of orgy as a social style is that it makes it impossible for men to trace lines of male paternity.
[00:15:00 - 00:15:10]	 This is very important. There is in a society which practices orgy no concept for men of my children.
[00:15:10 - 00:15:23]	 There is only the concept of our children meaning the tribe, the group. So male loyalty goes toward the group
[00:15:23 - 00:15:34]	 and this is very important because once men discovered male paternity, they discovered ownership of hunting grounds,
[00:15:34 - 00:15:45]	 food supplies, women, you name it and it tended to feed back into the formation of the ego structure.
[00:15:45 - 00:15:59]	 Well, and so I believe that really that was the golden age of humanity that we all long for and have a great poignancy for
[00:15:59 - 00:16:11]	 that has even been called the nostalgia for paradise. I believe we have this nostalgia for paradise because we are the victims of a fall.
[00:16:11 - 00:16:23]	 You see what happened was this African grassland environment which was necessary for the ecology of the mushrooms
[00:16:23 - 00:16:34]	 and therefore necessary to maintain this partnership paradise. Eventually it all dried up. The Sahara turned to desert.
[00:16:34 - 00:16:42]	 These people were forced out of Africa into the ancient Middle East and we fell into history.
[00:16:42 - 00:16:51]	 And this is the moment at which agriculture was invented. Agriculture because you have to stay in one place
[00:16:51 - 00:17:01]	 and tend the crops and defend the surplus of these successful agricultural efforts means the end to nomadism.
[00:17:01 - 00:17:15]	 It means the birth of cities. It means the creation through surpluses of classes of those who have and those who have not.
[00:17:15 - 00:17:23]	 It promotes kingship. It creates the need for standing armies. You can tell the drift here.
[00:17:23 - 00:17:34]	 All the institutions that we associate with male oppression, with hierarchy, with dominance come into play at that point.
[00:17:34 - 00:17:47]	 So my, I don't want to spend too much time on this, but just in a nutshell that situation is the situation in which we were born
[00:17:47 - 00:17:55]	 and came to consciousness. The paradisical situation of gender partnership that then dissolved.
[00:17:55 - 00:18:05]	 It was really a return back to the earlier primate style of male dominance and hierarchy when the mushroom was no longer available.
[00:18:05 - 00:18:13]	 We returned to our old monkey ways and we have been practicing those monkey ways ever since.
[00:18:13 - 00:18:23]	 Even as we reach toward the sequencing of the human genome, the exploration of the solar system, the exploration of the heart of matter.
[00:18:23 - 00:18:32]	 Nevertheless, we do it from a psychologically damaged perspective. Now, the question of drugs.
[00:18:32 - 00:18:41]	 Why as a species are we so obsessed and so addictible to so many things?
[00:18:41 - 00:18:49]	 There are a few animals who will break into a compound for fermented fruit or something like that,
[00:18:49 - 00:18:55]	 but we addict to dozens of substances and behaviors.
[00:18:55 - 00:19:06]	 Well, I believe that you can make an analogy to a person who was abused or traumatized as a child.
[00:19:06 - 00:19:23]	 The entirety of human history has been acted out in the light of the traumatic severing of our connection into the Gaian mother goddess
[00:19:23 - 00:19:35]	 planetary matrix of organic wholeness that was the centerpiece of the psychedelic experience back in the high paleolithic.
[00:19:35 - 00:19:49]	 In other words, the world of hallucination and vision that psilocybin carries you into is not your private unconscious
[00:19:49 - 00:20:01]	 or the architecture of your neural programming, but it is in fact a kind of intellect key, a kind of being,
[00:20:01 - 00:20:08]	 a kind of Gaian mind. For paleolithic human beings, it was the great goddess.
[00:20:08 - 00:20:20]	 Once you sever from this matrix of meaning, what James Joyce called the mama matrix most mysterious,
[00:20:20 - 00:20:31]	 once you sever yourself from that, then you have nothing but rationalism, ego, and male dominance to guide you.
[00:20:31 - 00:20:40]	 And that's what has led us into the nightmarish labyrinth of technical civilization, overpopulation,
[00:20:40 - 00:20:48]	 classism, racism, sexism, propaganda, so forth and so on, all the ills of modernity.
[00:20:48 - 00:20:59]	 So I wrote this book making this argument because I believe that if we could import into straight society,
[00:20:59 - 00:21:11]	 almost as a Trojan horse, the idea that these psychedelic compounds and plants are not aberrational,
[00:21:11 - 00:21:23]	 they are not pathological, they are not some minor subset of the human possibility that only freaks and weirdos become involved with,
[00:21:23 - 00:21:33]	 but rather they are in fact the catalyst that called forth humanness out of animal nature.
[00:21:33 - 00:21:46]	 If we could entertain this as a possibility, it would change the way we think about so-called primitive societies, shamanism,
[00:21:46 - 00:21:55]	 the psychedelic experience, society's efforts to control and eradicate these substances.
[00:21:55 - 00:22:04]	 And I believe that we are really in a race on this planet now between education and disaster.
[00:22:04 - 00:22:18]	 And it is the momentum of the ego that threatens to shove us over the cliff into Armageddon, famine, overpopulation.
[00:22:18 - 00:22:32]	 You can kiss goodbye to democratic values. We are all going to live in an Orwellian anthill if we don't, what, change our minds.
[00:22:32 - 00:22:42]	 We have to change our minds on a dime. I'm not talking about a 500 year program to slowly straighten things out.
[00:22:42 - 00:22:53]	 We have, I believe, less than 30 years to come to terms with the dissolving ozone hole, the toxification of the oceans,
[00:22:53 - 00:23:03]	 the greenhouse effect, the spread of epidemic disease, the rise of fascism, the relentless efforts of the free marketeers
[00:23:03 - 00:23:10]	 to deal product in every corner of the planet. We must change our minds.
[00:23:10 - 00:23:23]	 And what we have to do is have recourse to these same shamanic plants and shamanic practices that allowed our remote ancestors
[00:23:23 - 00:23:34]	 to come to terms with the mystery of being and their situation on this planet vis-a-vis the rest of nature.
[00:23:34 - 00:23:46]	 So I think it's very important at this time to make this argument as clearly as possible, to launch the idea into society,
[00:23:46 - 00:24:01]	 and let argument and debate rage. Now you may think that I'm proposing blowing up some already existing edifice of theory
[00:24:01 - 00:24:11]	 about how human beings came to be. This is not the case. As a matter of fact, orthodox anthropology hasn't a clue.
[00:24:11 - 00:24:21]	 We are the fly in the soup of natural sciences, explanation of the evolution of species.
[00:24:21 - 00:24:27]	 It's easy to understand how one kind of hummingbird emerges from another.
[00:24:27 - 00:24:38]	 It's not very easy to understand how creatures that build something like Los Angeles can emerge out of creatures who hunt ants
[00:24:38 - 00:24:49]	 by sticking grass stems down their holes, you know. We represent some kind of primary break with nature at the animal level.
[00:24:49 - 00:24:58]	 And I believe it's because we have a symbiotic relationship with all of nature. We are wired for this.
[00:24:58 - 00:25:08]	 There are drug receptors in our brains, in our physical brains that have been carried along for a thousand generations
[00:25:08 - 00:25:18]	 without really being called into use. But now is the time. If we really believe that these things expand consciousness,
[00:25:18 - 00:25:36]	 then we must study them, use them, apply them, because it's the absence of consciousness that is creating a terminal crisis,
[00:25:36 - 00:25:42]	 not only for us as a species, but for every living thing on this planet.
[00:25:42 - 00:25:57]	 And I think the psychedelic experience is as much a part of being alive as sexuality, language, the things which fulfill us
[00:25:57 - 00:26:10]	 and give meaning to the human experience are left incomplete and impossible to assimilate if we don't place the capstone
[00:26:10 - 00:26:24]	 on the edifice of our being in the world. And the capstone on that edifice is our right, our obligation, and the privilege
[00:26:24 - 00:26:33]	 of dissolving our ordinary ego boundaries and merging with the mind and purpose of the planet.
[00:26:33 - 00:26:42]	 This is what I was trying to say in the book, and this is what I hope I'm able to communicate to you this evening.
[00:26:42 - 00:26:50]	 Thank you very much.
[00:26:50 - 00:27:00]	 Okay, the first one. If you were in jail 20 years ago and you had to choose between Finnegan's Wake and McLuhan books
[00:27:00 - 00:27:08]	 or any drug, which would you choose? How about today?
[00:27:08 - 00:27:18]	 Has something happened in 20 years that should make these different choices? Well, I think I would choose, I think I would probably choose
[00:27:18 - 00:27:21]	 I'm in prison, right?
[00:27:21 - 00:27:25]	 You can either read or get high.
[00:27:25 - 00:27:37]	 Well, in spite of the flash of something like psilocybin, in all honesty, if that were the choice, I think I'd choose cannabis.
[00:27:37 - 00:27:50]	 After all, cannabis is sort of the staff of life. The way I do psychedelics is rarely and at high doses,
[00:27:50 - 00:28:01]	 because I really think you shouldn't fiddle with these things or grow too, too blase in their presence.
[00:28:01 - 00:28:12]	 But cannabis is sort of the bridge between ordinary reality and the extremely intense psychedelic.
[00:28:12 - 00:28:19]	 That leads right into this question. What do you know about the ancient history of hemp?
[00:28:19 - 00:28:25]	 Well, probably a lot less than a number of people in this room.
[00:28:25 - 00:28:36]	 Hemp is probably one of the world's oldest cultivated plants, possibly the world's oldest cultivated plant.
[00:28:36 - 00:28:45]	 And one of the interesting things about hemp, which I discuss in The Food of the Gods, is the way in which words,
[00:28:45 - 00:28:51]	 you know, hemp was always a source of fiber as well as drugs.
[00:28:51 - 00:29:01]	 And it's very interesting to me the way the words for narrative are also words associated with weaving,
[00:29:01 - 00:29:08]	 so that we spin a yarn, lies are made of whole cloth.
[00:29:08 - 00:29:16]	 We untangle a story. We follow the thread of narrative.
[00:29:16 - 00:29:23]	 You see, I think I call the chapter on cannabis in my book, The Ballad of the Dreaming Weavers.
[00:29:23 - 00:29:35]	 I think the wonderful thing about these psychoactive substances is that they inspire us to communicate with each other.
[00:29:35 - 00:29:44]	 You know, there are couples who very little passes between them verbally.
[00:29:44 - 00:29:51]	 And if you were to hear probably a recording of your own daily exchanges with the people around you,
[00:29:51 - 00:29:56]	 it tends to get down to the very mundane and minimal.
[00:29:56 - 00:30:05]	 You have to sort of stimulate yourself for there to be a flood of intentionalized verbal communication.
[00:30:05 - 00:30:10]	 And this is what melts barriers between people.
[00:30:10 - 00:30:20]	 I mean, communication is real. It allows one mind to flow into another.
[00:30:20 - 00:30:26]	 It allows viewpoints to leap from one soul to another.
[00:30:26 - 00:30:30]	 I didn't talk about it in my little remarks at the beginning,
[00:30:30 - 00:30:39]	 but I really believe that psilocybin and its cousins were probably responsible for the emergence of language.
[00:30:39 - 00:30:51]	 [Silence]
[00:30:51 - 00:31:01]	 That this, if you wanted to look for the thumbprint of the goddess on being, the phenomenon to look at is human language.
[00:31:01 - 00:31:04]	 Notice that it's a behavior.
[00:31:04 - 00:31:10]	 If someone is keeping their mouth shut, you can't tell whether they're a verbal person or not.
[00:31:10 - 00:31:18]	 But once someone starts to talk, it's the most extraordinary kind of human behavior.
[00:31:18 - 00:31:27]	 It's that thoughts are downloaded into a symbolic notation composed of little mouth noises,
[00:31:27 - 00:31:35]	 which then fail across acoustical space and are reconstructed in the brain of the listener
[00:31:35 - 00:31:42]	 so that these thoughts are magically reconstructed in the brain of the listener.
[00:31:42 - 00:31:50]	 We take this for granted, but when you analyze it, it's an extraordinarily mysterious, almost, you could say,
[00:31:50 - 00:31:57]	 supernatural power, which we all exercise all the time.
[00:31:57 - 00:32:09]	 And I believe that this is something which these psychedelics kickstarted in the neural architecture of our remote ancestors.
[00:32:09 - 00:32:12]	 [Inaudible]
[00:32:12 - 00:32:16]	 Five dried grams of Stropharia cubensis.
[00:32:16 - 00:32:24]	 And what I would urge you to do is, if you think you're a sophisticate,
[00:32:24 - 00:32:32]	 by a scale and weigh the dose that you've been calling good enough, it may stand your hair on end.
[00:32:32 - 00:32:39]	 Because there are a lot of people running around who think they know what the psychedelic experience is about,
[00:32:39 - 00:32:47]	 who have only scuffed their feet on the doorstop, you know, haven't even entered into the atrium,
[00:32:47 - 00:32:54]	 let alone explored the cellar, the attic, and the basement of these places.
[00:32:54 - 00:33:00]	 Are there any legal plants that you are aware of that contain DMT?
[00:33:00 - 00:33:04]	 Oh, yeah, there are a number of plants that contain DMT.
[00:33:04 - 00:33:11]	 The problem is to find one that contains enough that it's worth your while to try and do something with it.
[00:33:11 - 00:33:23]	 Currently, the hot one on that grocery list is a plant called Desmanthus illinoensis, the Illinois bundleweed.
[00:33:23 - 00:33:31]	 It's interesting that it's called bundleweed because there's no history of human usage.
[00:33:31 - 00:33:39]	 But as many of you probably know, a bundle is what a Plains Indian shaman calls his mojo bag.
[00:33:39 - 00:33:43]	 So the fact that it's called bundleweed is fairly suggestive.
[00:33:43 - 00:33:53]	 The outer bark of the roots of that plant contain a very hefty hit of DMT.
[00:33:53 - 00:34:01]	 And you can order it from various exotic plant companies and can experiment with it.
[00:34:01 - 00:34:04]	 DMT has to be smoked.
[00:34:04 - 00:34:10]	 If you take it orally, it will be destroyed by an enzyme in your intestines.
[00:34:10 - 00:34:15]	 So it has to be smoked in most situations.
[00:34:15 - 00:34:19]	 At the end of your book, "Silicide and Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide,"
[00:34:19 - 00:34:22]	 there is an ad for ordering cubensis spores.
[00:34:22 - 00:34:26]	 It says, "Voidware prohibited, California."
[00:34:26 - 00:34:30]	 How can we order them in California?
[00:34:30 - 00:34:36]	 Well, I guess you have to have a friend with a post office box out of California.
[00:34:36 - 00:34:44]	 If you're wondering why California is the only state in the union that has made silicibin spores illegal,
[00:34:44 - 00:34:48]	 because you see the spores contain no psilocybin.
[00:34:48 - 00:34:51]	 It isn't illegal because it contains psilocybin.
[00:34:51 - 00:34:54]	 It's illegal because you can grow mushrooms from it.
[00:34:54 - 00:35:00]	 It's because there was a clown a few years ago--maybe he's still around--this guy, Ken Matty.
[00:35:00 - 00:35:06]	 And he was defeated in the Republican primary for governor a few years ago.
[00:35:06 - 00:35:13]	 He was defeated because he admitted that he, years ago, had had a puff of marijuana.
[00:35:13 - 00:35:19]	 And so after his defeat in the Republican primary, he went to his staff and said,
[00:35:19 - 00:35:26]	 "I've got to get some anti-drug legislation associated with my name, see what you can come up with."
[00:35:26 - 00:35:34]	 And the best they could come up with was a piss-and-bill to make mushroom spores illegal.
[00:35:34 - 00:35:47]	 So we all have the privilege of living in the only state in the union that has seen fit to guard you from this hideous menace.
[00:35:47 - 00:35:49]	 [laughter]
[00:35:49 - 00:35:57]	 If hallucinogenics caused mutations in the consciousness in the past, do you think they are doing so in the present?
[00:35:57 - 00:36:03]	 And if so, or if not, what do you see as the future of consciousness?
[00:36:03 - 00:36:12]	 Well, you know, the human physical form seems to have stabilized about 50,000 years ago,
[00:36:12 - 00:36:20]	 right around the time that language began to emerge and culture began to take hold.
[00:36:20 - 00:36:32]	 And it's thought that once you possess language and culture, then change, mutation, is transferred into the cultural domain.
[00:36:32 - 00:36:38]	 That's why we haven't changed physically very much in the last 50,000 years,
[00:36:38 - 00:36:42]	 but our cultural changes have just been lightning fast.
[00:36:42 - 00:36:51]	 I mean, we have fashions which don't even last six months before we move on to the next one.
[00:36:51 - 00:37:02]	 I think that the way I think about these psychedelics is that they are like catalysts for the imagination.
[00:37:02 - 00:37:07]	 And what that means specifically is they are catalysts for language.
[00:37:07 - 00:37:12]	 Language is somehow the new body of mankind.
[00:37:12 - 00:37:17]	 And so what we have to do is change our language.
[00:37:17 - 00:37:30]	 And those some of you who lived through the 1960s probably know that the major legacy of the LSD era still with us
[00:37:30 - 00:37:40]	 is that it empowered certain shifts in language, certain concepts that previously couldn't even be articulated.
[00:37:40 - 00:37:45]	 I mean, these things come in for a lot of being sneered at by straight people.
[00:37:45 - 00:37:59]	 But nevertheless, notions such as the vibe of a situation or ego tripping or laying a guilt trip on somebody,
[00:37:59 - 00:38:09]	 I can remember in most cases the very first time I ever heard each of these phrases and how it was like something clicks in your mind.
[00:38:09 - 00:38:12]	 You say, I don't understand what this person means.
[00:38:12 - 00:38:19]	 And they say, oh, they mean something that I never before knew how to indicate.
[00:38:19 - 00:38:22]	 And then you try it out and use it yourself.
[00:38:22 - 00:38:34]	 You cannot we cannot evolve any faster than we evolve our language because you cannot go to places that you cannot describe.
[00:38:34 - 00:38:38]	 So somehow the description comes first.
[00:38:38 - 00:38:44]	 The compass needle must be set on a linguistic goal.
[00:38:44 - 00:38:48]	 And then the culture can be steered in that direction.
[00:38:48 - 00:38:59]	 And I think that part of the way I see my book is I'm introducing new linguistic models for reality and human evolution.
[00:38:59 - 00:39:05]	 And if they are good models, I believe ideas are just like animals.
[00:39:05 - 00:39:09]	 They compete in an environment of natural selection.
[00:39:09 - 00:39:20]	 The good ideas, the swift and strong and clean ideas will triumph over the slow, the muddled and the incomplete.
[00:39:20 - 00:39:32]	 And so if we can articulate our devotion to the psychedelic experience, if we can articulate its importance and its transformative power,
[00:39:32 - 00:39:40]	 then we will eventually be able to place it on the social agenda and then we will be heard.
[00:39:40 - 00:39:46]	 But not if we don't articulate our intent.
[00:39:46 - 00:39:52]	 What role does ayahuasca play in our planetary and human evolution?
[00:39:52 - 00:39:59]	 How does ayahuasca compare with other hallucinogens such as mushrooms and peyote?
[00:39:59 - 00:40:12]	 Well, for those of you who aren't familiar with ayahuasca, this is a combinatory hallucinogenic beverage that is in use in a wide area over in the upper Amazon basin.
[00:40:12 - 00:40:16]	 And now it's spread down into Brazil.
[00:40:16 - 00:40:20]	 There are a number of interesting things about ayahuasca.
[00:40:20 - 00:40:31]	 On one level, what's interesting about it is that there is nothing in it that is not in the brain of each one of you as you sit here.
[00:40:31 - 00:40:39]	 It is, in a sense, not a drug at all, but a neurotransmitter cocktail.
[00:40:39 - 00:40:53]	 And this is very suggestive, you see, because it means that natural brain chemistry is very close to being some kind of hallucinogenic trip.
[00:40:53 - 00:41:02]	 The other thing that's interesting about ayahuasca is that in the Amazon basin, where it's been used for thousands of years,
[00:41:02 - 00:41:10]	 the people get together in small groups at night in dark places and they sing.
[00:41:10 - 00:41:12]	 They get loaded and they sing.
[00:41:12 - 00:41:26]	 And then when you sit with these people and listen to them discuss their experiences, they talk about these songs not as though they were musical performances,
[00:41:26 - 00:41:31]	 but as though they were pictorial creations of some sort.
[00:41:31 - 00:41:41]	 In other words, someone will say of a song, "I like the part with the silky gray stripes and the yellow dots,
[00:41:41 - 00:41:50]	 but when you got off into that thing that was like camouflage only in pink and violet, I didn't like that."
[00:41:50 - 00:41:53]	 I think, "No, my God, what's going on here?"
[00:41:53 - 00:42:05]	 Well, what's going on is that this slight shift in ratios of neurotransmitters allows sound, sound to be beheld.
[00:42:05 - 00:42:08]	 This is the nature of this experience.
[00:42:08 - 00:42:21]	 So these people sing these songs, but the recipient of this theatrical performance sees a kind of sculptural modality come into being.
[00:42:21 - 00:42:34]	 Well, if you can see what someone else is seeing, if you can have someone else's point of view, in a very real sense, you are that person.
[00:42:34 - 00:42:40]	 We say to stand in somebody else's shoes means to be them.
[00:42:40 - 00:42:54]	 So a naive person, or at least I thought in thinking about telepathy before I went to the Amazon, that telepathy would be hearing somebody else think.
[00:42:54 - 00:42:56]	 That's not what telepathy is.
[00:42:56 - 00:43:06]	 Telepathy is seeing what somebody else means, and this is very, very close to the surface in us.
[00:43:06 - 00:43:20]	 It's no strain for me to imagine knowing what's in ayahuasca and what's in the human brain to see human brain chemistry as essentially poised,
[00:43:20 - 00:43:33]	 just a one or two gene mutation away from a shift in brain chemistry that would cause language to become visible.
[00:43:33 - 00:43:39]	 You know, there's this tradition of a magical lost language of perfect poetry.
[00:43:39 - 00:43:57]	 It's said that the ancient Irish and other Aboriginal peoples possessed a poetic language so powerful that to hear these poets perform was to literally be swept into the worlds of their recitation.
[00:43:57 - 00:44:14]	 I think what that is is that we hover very close to being able to cross the transition from audially processing incoming linguistic signals to being able to visually process them.
[00:44:14 - 00:44:33]	 And when you can visually process someone's linguistic intent, you are much more in tune with them, much more intimately involved in their meaning than if you simply hear what they say.
[00:44:33 - 00:44:37]	 And that really, for me, is what I think these psychedelics are doing.
[00:44:37 - 00:44:57]	 They are clarifying, catalyzing, densifying language and therefore the connections that hold us together and therefore the connections that hold our world together and make reality, make whatever sense it does make.
[00:44:57 - 00:45:04]	 What is the state of the legality of importing, possessing and taking ayahuasca?
[00:45:04 - 00:45:07]	 It's in a limbo.
[00:45:07 - 00:45:25]	 There was a Brazilian cult called Santo Daime that was holding ayahuasca sessions in the Boston area and they had a load of ayahuasca come through customs that was stopped.
[00:45:25 - 00:45:47]	 And the guy who went to pick it up spent a night in jail, but when it was all sorted out, a judge took a look at it and basically, since nobody knew what it even was, they were given a slap on the wrist and told not to do it anymore.
[00:45:47 - 00:45:51]	 So it is in a kind of legal limbo.
[00:45:51 - 00:45:58]	 DMT, which is what makes ayahuasca go, is a Schedule I drug.
[00:45:58 - 00:46:10]	 It's in that hardest of hard drug categories where they put all the psychedelics, heroin and very little else, not even cocaine.
[00:46:10 - 00:46:23]	 The definition of Schedule I is no medical application under any circumstances and cocaine is used in certain kinds of eye and throat operations.
[00:46:23 - 00:46:25]	 So it has a medical application.
[00:46:25 - 00:46:49]	 Drugs like psilocybin and DMT were made illegal in 1966 and '67 without any scientific evidence being offered that there was anything wrong with these things, without any record of emergency room admissions or any medical problem whatsoever.
[00:46:49 - 00:47:05]	 It's possible if someone had sufficient energy and money that these cases, these matters could be raised again with the law and they would have to show why these things should be illegal.
[00:47:05 - 00:47:12]	 It was basically a moment of general social panic brought on by LSD hysteria.
[00:47:12 - 00:47:19]	 Now it's Tim Leary, I give him credit for this, although he always tells me he can't remember saying it.
[00:47:19 - 00:47:30]	 But I believe that Tim Leary once said LSD is a drug capable of causing psychotic behavior in people who have not taken it.
[00:47:30 - 00:47:47]	 And this is what happened in the 1960s, a whole bunch of people were driven psychotic by not taking LSD and they made it illegal.
[00:47:47 - 00:47:53]	 How do we translate these ideas politically?
[00:47:53 - 00:47:55]	 I'm active with the Green Party.
[00:47:55 - 00:47:57]	 How do we change people's minds?
[00:47:57 - 00:48:00]	 Give him a Terence tape.
[00:48:00 - 00:48:03]	 How do we translate these things politically?
[00:48:03 - 00:48:06]	 Well, one way is by coming out of the closet.
[00:48:06 - 00:48:13]	 I mean, if you look around you, we look pretty much like everybody else walking around on the street.
[00:48:13 - 00:48:20]	 We've self-selected to be here tonight because of our interests in this subject.
[00:48:20 - 00:48:34]	 But in the same way that black people had to get their act together, gay people had to get, you get no respect in this society unless you stand up for what you believe in.
[00:48:34 - 00:48:43]	 And too many of us have been hounded into silence and paranoia on this psychedelic issue.
[00:48:43 - 00:48:52]	 I mean, they, you know, the just say no mentality and the, oh, how could you approach to people who take psychedelics?
[00:48:52 - 00:48:58]	 I think we have to be a little more strident, a little more visible.
[00:48:58 - 00:49:16]	 And then paradoxically, we have to deepen our own commitment to these things by striving for ever more heroic doses, ever deeper penetration into the mystery.
[00:49:16 - 00:49:28]	 So that will both strengthen our social core and then our willingness to be forthright about what we stand for and believe in will bring other people into this.
[00:49:28 - 00:49:44]	 One of the most satisfying experiences that I have as a public person is when after giving some kind of a talk, somebody will come up to me afterwards and say, I thought I was crazy until I heard you talk.
[00:49:44 - 00:49:56]	 And now I realize there are at least two of us. Well, there are hundreds of us, thousands of us. The realities that we are talking about are real.
[00:49:56 - 00:50:04]	 It ain't pathology, it ain't hallucination or delusion or social irresponsibility or all this other malarkey.
[00:50:04 - 00:50:11]	 It's the lost continent, the lost other half of the human mind.
[00:50:11 - 00:50:23]	 And as long as we ignore it, pretend it doesn't exist or are somehow cowed into keeping shut up about it, then we are infantile.
[00:50:23 - 00:50:30]	 We accept the kind of big brother umbrella over our reality.
[00:50:30 - 00:50:44]	 We should be as free to discuss this, talk about it and work it out among our friends and significant other as we do our sexuality or our investment portfolios or our vacation plans.
[00:50:44 - 00:50:48]	 It's just part of being a human being.
[00:50:48 - 00:51:06]	 Many of you, I'm sure, have heard me say to go from birth to the grave without having a psychedelic experience is to me as creepy a notion as to go from birth to the grave without ever having a sexual experience.
[00:51:06 - 00:51:12]	 It means you led a life of self-chosen infantilism and ignorance.
[00:51:12 - 00:51:26]	 And that's not what life is for. Life is some kind of moment suspended between eternities in which you may have a real opportunity to get your shit together and figure out what's going on.
[00:51:26 - 00:51:34]	 But if you run around saying, you know, not that experience and God forbid that experience and I don't want to go there.
[00:51:34 - 00:51:42]	 Well, then they'll just plant you and lower your box and you'll be another person who never quite got their act together.
[00:51:42 - 00:51:52]	 This is not what we're striving for. We want life to be as rich, deep, complete, high as possible.
[00:51:52 - 00:51:55]	 Do it.
[00:51:55 - 00:52:03]	 Maybe you just answered this one.
[00:52:03 - 00:52:08]	 What are the things that give meaning to the human experience?
[00:52:08 - 00:52:13]	 Sex, drugs and rock and roll.
[00:52:13 - 00:52:19]	 And higher mathematics.
[00:52:19 - 00:52:26]	 Do you think hallucinogenic should be used for initiating young people into adulthood?
[00:52:26 - 00:52:33]	 Well, you mean like some kind of initiation into puberty as in aboriginal societies.
[00:52:33 - 00:52:40]	 I think one of the things that we can do is get straight with our children about this.
[00:52:40 - 00:52:53]	 And one of the most to me disappointing, I don't know if disappointing is the word, but anyway, it's very bad to encounter hip people who say, you know,
[00:52:53 - 00:53:02]	 gee, we'd like to twist up a bomber and get you loaded. Can you wait till the kids are in bed?
[00:53:02 - 00:53:07]	 In other words, these people are living some kind of schizophrenic existence.
[00:53:07 - 00:53:16]	 They can't get straight with their own children about their relationship to consciousness alteration.
[00:53:16 - 00:53:32]	 And I think that what we need to do is be able to be proud enough and forthright enough about what we're doing to hand this stuff on to our children in a responsible manner.
[00:53:32 - 00:53:48]	 It's far better to get your kids familiar and able to navigate with something like cannabis than to turn them loose in the world of high density media images,
[00:53:48 - 00:54:04]	 alcoholism, speed, tobacco, so forth and so on. If we can bring our children up in an acceptance and a sense of being comfortable with these dimensions,
[00:54:04 - 00:54:08]	 then we really have performed a great service.
[00:54:08 - 00:54:20]	 I dare say there are probably only a handful of us in this room who learned about psychedelics from an exemplary set of parents.
[00:54:20 - 00:54:25]	 I certainly didn't. And imagine what a difference it would have made.
[00:54:25 - 00:54:31]	 So this is something we can do for our children as to what age, under what conditions.
[00:54:31 - 00:54:36]	 This has to do with, you know, your style, your kid's style, so forth and so on.
[00:54:36 - 00:54:45]	 But as long as we're so guilt riddled and off balance on this issue that we can't even admit to our kids what we're doing,
[00:54:45 - 00:54:53]	 I think the establishment is going to have us right where it wants us.
[00:54:53 - 00:54:54]	 One more? Okay.
[00:54:54 - 00:54:55]	 One more.
[00:54:55 - 00:55:06]	 I have a trellis of heavenly blue morning glories. After harvesting the seeds, what is the recommended dosage and what are the expected effects of a therapeutic dose?
[00:55:06 - 00:55:07]	 Thank you.
[00:55:07 - 00:55:12]	 The first psychedelic that I ever took was heavenly blue morning glories.
[00:55:12 - 00:55:18]	 I have a soft spot in the bottom of my stomach for it.
[00:55:18 - 00:55:30]	 Well, what you do is you grow the morning glories and then they will form these seed capsules, these little tear-shaped seed capsules in the late fall.
[00:55:30 - 00:55:36]	 Cut down the whole morning glory after these seed capsules have gotten quite large.
[00:55:36 - 00:55:45]	 And then put it in a big brown paper bag and set it somewhere where the sun can bake out this bag.
[00:55:45 - 00:55:54]	 And usually the little seed capsules will spring open and shed the seeds and you can just pour the seeds out of the bottom of the bag.
[00:55:54 - 00:56:01]	 Or if a few don't get loose, then you can beat on the sides of the bag and these seed capsules will break open.
[00:56:01 - 00:56:03]	 You can just pour the seeds out.
[00:56:03 - 00:56:11]	 Now, morning glory seeds do contain an ematic, a sickening agent called estercumarone.
[00:56:11 - 00:56:17]	 And that's going to cause you some nausea in the first hour.
[00:56:17 - 00:56:30]	 And what you do is you take, and now this is a committed dose, we're not talking, you know, we're talking, this will definitely rivet your full attention.
[00:56:30 - 00:56:39]	 Take about 225 seeds, grind them up in a coffee grinder or something like that.
[00:56:39 - 00:56:58]	 And I always used to put them into a milkshake or applesauce because what you end up with is a fairly daunting, a dauntingly large pile of kind of crumbly, dry, bitter, evil smelling stuff which you've got to get down.
[00:56:58 - 00:57:03]	 So put it into some applesauce or something like that.
[00:57:03 - 00:57:09]	 And then on an empty stomach, in silent darkness or out in nature.
[00:57:09 - 00:57:13]	 And this is not to be underestimated.
[00:57:13 - 00:57:18]	 This is not some kind of "gee, if only we had the real thing" kind of strategy.
[00:57:18 - 00:57:21]	 This is the real thing.
[00:57:21 - 00:57:39]	 And wonderful hallucinations of, in my case, the motifs of the Toltec and Aztec civilization that actually utilized these things, which raises other questions we could discuss another time.
[00:57:39 - 00:57:42]	 But that's a, now, a word of caution.
[00:57:42 - 00:57:59]	 Don't go out now and buy a bunch of packages of these Morning Glory seeds and grind them up and take them because these weasels who sell these seeds have soaked them all in a poison.
[00:57:59 - 00:58:03]	 They've soaked them in a poison, a fungicide.
[00:58:03 - 00:58:07]	 It says right on them, not for human consumption.
[00:58:07 - 00:58:09]	 They're not just whistling Dixie.
[00:58:09 - 00:58:15]	 That's why you have to grow your own crop to get a clean crop of these things.
[00:58:15 - 00:58:18]	 And then you have a ticket to ride.
[00:58:18 - 00:58:20]	 Thank you very much.
[00:58:20 - 00:58:22]	 Thank you, Sharon.
[00:58:22 - 00:58:25]	 I want to thank the Phoenix Bookstore.
[00:58:25 - 00:58:27]	 [ Applause ]