"Global perspectives and psychedelic poetics" is what it says in the propaganda, which I
 assume is simply permission to rave about whatever comes to mind.
 Global perspectives.
 I guess what I could say about this, from a psychedelic perspective, the thing that
 is different for psychedelic people looking at the global dilemma that we're in and that
 increases, that continues to deepen around us, is that it's, from my point of view, permission
 to hope rather than despair, because I think that processes, institutions that for a thousand
 years or more have been building toward some kind of symmetry break, some kind of definitive,
 self-revealing moment, that we now are turning final, as pilots say.
 We're now deeply embedded in the pattern.
 We can see enough of what's ahead of us to begin to actually feel the texture of the
 end of human history.
 It's no longer an abstraction.
 Even the straight people who own the world with their long-term and short-term projections
 looking at population growth, spread of greenhouse gases, disappearance of the ozone hole, rising
 third world expectations, so forth and so on.
 When you propagate all these trends, it seems very clear that business as usual is no longer
 an option.
 Nobody's talking about that.
 So we're either in some kind of final, fatal meltdown of the values of Western civilization
 revealed now after a thousand or two thousand year run to essentially be bankrupt, or we're
 going to transform ourselves unrecognizably.
 There really isn't any middle ground.
 The most radical and least likely future of all, it seems to me, is a future in which
 we continue just to stumble forward as we have been since the Industrial Revolution.
 That's no longer an option.
 And so then the question becomes a sort of a Gnostic conundrum.
 Is this the final act of some kind of great cosmic tragedy in which intelligence rises
 out of the slime, is shown to be inadequate and sinks back into the slime, or is this
 a tale of difficulty overcome and heroism won, and are we going to be able to shed the
 monkey nature and shed the ego and actually move up to some kind of shining ideal?
 If you think of us as the descendants of the angels, this is a pretty tatty circumstance
 we've come to rest in.
 On the other hand, if you think of us as the descendants of shit-hurling apes screeching
 through the treetops, then it's pretty amazing what has been accomplished here.
 One of the dilemmas that I feel very strongly, and I'm just sort of talking off the top of
 my head here because whenever a crowd is small enough, I sort of feel like I'm in my own
 living room.
 We don't have to have the pretense of knowing lecturer and eager to be educated audience.
 The real challenge, I think, is trying to decide what is baggage and what is ballast
 that's going to have to be dumped.
 Can the future be a celebration of humanness as we have known it, meaning in the animal
 body with all its joys and pains, with all its frailty and potential for ecstasy?
 Or is what we call human nature somehow transcendental?
 And did we only rest for a moment in the monkey body as once the cutting edge of evolution
 must have rested in the great reptiles and at some earlier phase in history rested in
 the fish and so on?
 Is consciousness something uniquely human and must we keep the animal body with us?
 Is our destiny to become the gardener caretakers of a revivified earth?
 Or is the earth like a placenta of some sort that we have literally sucked all the nutrition
 and potential out of because we're on our way to some grander, higher domain of being?
 I don't have the answer to these kinds of questions.
 I feel it very poignantly.
 It's very poignantly focused in the psychedelic, in the experience of psychedelic plants and
 psychedelic shamanism because, you know, as any of you have followed my ideas on this,
 know I've spent a lot of time in the Amazon basin with human populations that seem to
 have struck some kind of dynamic balance with the earth and yet the paradox of that dynamic
 balance is that when you take the sacraments, the hallucinogenic plants of these people,
 you're propelled into worlds of science fiction like strangeness, transcendental dimensions
 of titanic implication.
 And then, at least I personally have come to the realization that this is how those
 cultures have chosen to deal with the Faustian impulse in human beings.
 It's been somehow confined in the domain of the imagination.
 We, meaning we who trace our ancestry back to Europe, are part of a different style,
 a different strain of human being, if you will.
 We are the idea excretors, not satisfied to have a canoe, a net, five fish hooks, and
 a bowl, but instead we take matter, we Western civilization, Western technology, and we impress
 upon matter ideas, millions of ideas, cities like Manhattan, high performance weaponry,
 enormous works of art.
 All of this is a kind of impulse, very strong in Western human beings to bring the ideas
 out of the domain of mind and to somehow solidify them in matter, permanence.
 The cult of the West is permanence.
 I always feel that when you can find the obsessive center of a society, you probably have put
 your finger on its central neurosis as well.
 I remember when I spent time in India, India is rife with talk of Shakti.
 Shakti is energy conceived of in various ways.
 It can be sexual energy or it can actually be electricity flowing through wires is called
 Shakti.
 And I realized being in India that the Indian obsession with Shakti was a consequence of
 there not being any, that this was a society where energy had become the hardest commodity
 to encounter.
 And I think in the West, permanence is our great bugaboo because we are born into the
 realization that everything is slipping through our fingers at the very moment that it comes
 into existence.
 The hardest psychedelic truth to assimilate, and you don't have to take psychedelics to
 assimilate this, if you just live, this will be hammered in on you again and again.
 And it's not, well, it's a cause for exaltation, it's a cause for despair.
 It's that nothing lasts, nothing lasts, you know, not your fortune, not your misfortune,
 not your lovers, your enemies, your children, ultimately not even your own life and body.
 Everything fades.
 And so the Western response to this is the attempt to create something permanent, civilizations,
 enduring ideas, enduring institutions.
 All this is doomed to failure.
 And I see this Western obsession with the cult of permanence as a consequence of the
 Western obsession with ego.
 Ego to my mind is the very thing, if you had to somehow meld each problem into the next
 problem to try and reduce all problems to one, what you would eventually come to is
 the realization that ego is what is destroying us.
 Our inability to displace our loyalty away from the unique locus of space and time represented
 by our own bodies.
 You know, community, communalism, these are the things that we fear, that we repress,
 and that we at the same time struggle to realize.
 I mean, the collapse of communism on one level was the collapse of a repressive, nightmarish,
 paranoid social system.
 But the dream which lay behind that was a dream of community, of unity, of sisterhood
 and brotherhood.
 And the great concern now is that with the collapse of even a pretense of that position,
 that we are further fragmented, further atomized into individual competing microbes of greed
 and need.
 And this is precisely the attitudes which will push us ever closer to species extinction
 and to global ruin.
 Well when you look at thousands and thousands of psychedelic experiences, you, to my mind,
 what you come away with is the notion that, you know, no matter who you are, Amazonian
 shaman, Hasidic rabbi, nuclear physicist, the psychedelic will dissolve boundaries.
 It will dissolve your boundaries and force you to realize the commonality of the flesh.
 You know, it's a startling thing to realize that really what you represent is nothing
 more than a point of view.
 And that we each are such a point of view, triangulating perception through what is essentially
 simply a nexus of our past history.
 We always are talking about the past and the future.
 But it's worth noticing that we all managed to get here this morning, this place, this
 time, and not one of us has the same past as any other of us.
 This moment, like any moment, is not a confluence of the past, it is a confluence of many pasts.
 And these many pasts come into a nexus of connection and then move on to become many,
 many futures.
 The reason I'm so interested in the psychedelic potential and willing to speak about it is
 because I think that the myth of our separateness, which was the glory of our institutional accomplishments,
 parliamentary democracy, individual rights, liberation of various classes and so forth,
 has now turned somewhat sour.
 There has got to be something more to it than just turning people loose to loot the planet
 so that everyone can pile up more and more stuff, stuff which doesn't satisfy anyway.
 And I think in talking about the future, what we have to somehow do is dematerialize the
 future.
 And there are several ways or many ways to do this.
 People have preached voluntary simplicity and some people are into this.
 However, it's hypocritical to preach this in the third world to people who have nothing.
 We have everything, so we've seen the fallacy of condominiums and Mercedes, so then we preach
 this in Bangladesh.
 This is a bit disingenuous.
 The dematerializing of culture, somehow you see what we have to recognize in the wake
 of the collapse of communism is that capitalism as well is a system with a fatal flaw that
 is set against human nature.
 Capitalism assumes an endlessly exploitable frontier of resources.
 This we have got not.
 So capitalism is now essentially, unless it can be radically retooled, an anti-human philosophy.
 It's literally chewing up the ground we're standing on.
 But there is nothing in the basic notion of capitalism that says that we have to be thing
 dealers.
 This is simply the style of capitalism that we have fallen into.
 Somehow we have to dematerialize existence and I don't know whether that means virtual
 reality.
 Some of you have heard me say that my vision of a perfect future is 25% of the present
 world population living in ecological balance, living in an apparently primitive, naked,
 aboriginal state.
 But when you step into the minds of those people and look behind their closed eyelids,
 there are menus hanging in bio-tele-electronic space.
 Culture you see can be downloaded into a chip, installed behind the eyelids so that it is
 freely commandable as an experience in the imagination.
 But if we insist on continually extracting resources from the earth and fashioning our
 dreams out of the stuff of earth, then our dreams are destined to turn to nightmare.
 It can't be any other way.
 So that's one thing about the future.
 The future needs to be dematerialized.
 And then, you know, since people always accuse me of being a harebrained dreamer, I've tried
 to come up with something approaching a practical suggestion and I took this need to the feet
 of the mushroom gods, having been challenged by somebody at a talk like this.
 They said, "Well, you're always saying these mushrooms speak.
 Why don't you ask them how to save the world?"
 And I thought this was kind of disingenuous, but the next time I had the telephone to hyperspace
 in my hot hand, I did make the inquiry.
 And the suggestion which came back, I think, is at least food for thought.
 The suggestion was, you want to save the world, you want to overcome male dominance, the momentum
 of consumerism, so forth and so on.
 Every woman should bear only one natural child.
 This is an interesting idea, whether you take it seriously as program or not.
 If every woman were to commit herself to bearing only one natural child, the population of
 the earth would fall by 50% in 40 years without war or famine or epidemic disease.
 If this program were continued for another 40 years, the population would fall by half
 again.
 This means in 80 years, the population of the planet could be reduced 75%.
 Why have we not heard anything about this, even for it to be denounced?
 I'm not saying it has to be embraced, but why isn't it a tiny fanatical minority advocating
 this?
 I think it's because it's inconceivable in this society to try and practice capitalism
 in a situation of retreating demographics.
 It also would be a solution which would place enormous power in the hands of women.
 Women are often heard to complain about their powerlessness.
 But here's a plan which requires very little input from white guys.
 I took this idea to demographers and said, "What about it?
 This seems so simple.
 Most people think there are no solutions.
 Here's a very simple solution.
 What about it?"
 And they said, "Yes, well, it's more startling than you realize because women in upper class,
 high tech, western society, a woman, say, on the upper east side of Manhattan or Malibu
 or the Seacliff District of San Francisco, a child born to that woman will have 800 to
 1,000 times more negative impact on the earth than a child born to a woman in Bangladesh.
 If you were to go to Bangladesh and meet a woman in the back streets of Dhaka who told
 you that her ambition in life was to have 900 children, you'd think you were dealing
 with some kind of sociopath, a kind of typhoid Mary of the demographic scene.
 And yet, every child born into moderately well-off yuppie families in high tech societies
 is in that position.
 We prefer not to think of it this way.
 I think it's very interesting that one could make a case to women in western societies.
 You could say, "How would you like vastly increased leisure time?
 How would you like increased disposable income?
 And how would you like to take upon yourself a truly heroic social role?"
 This is what's being offered with this suggestion to limit reproduction to one natural child.
 No more heroic, no more politically correct action can be taken.
 And interestingly, the women you want to convince of this position are the women you are most
 likely to be able to convince.
 Educated, white women with above average incomes.
 So that's a very practical suggestion.
 More likely to be implemented than my dream of lunar inoculations with psilocybin for
 the entire population to dissolve the calcareous ego formations that have sprung up in the
 bloodstream since the last full moon, which I also think would be a fine idea.
 (audience laughing)


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